When Did Kindness Come to Be for Special Occasions Only?

A dear old childhood friend (reconnected with on Facebook in recent years) posted a link to an idea for children leading up to the holidays: a calendar with suggested random acts of kindness.  This friend is a person who embodies kindness every day in every moment with everyone she meets; an exemplar of the cheerful goodness to which I aspire but only approximate on my best days.  She is the kind of person that does not need such a calendar to remind her to bestow kindness on those she meets. 

http://www.coffeecupsandcrayons.com/random-acts-christmas-kindness-printable-advent-calendar/

The heading on the graphic does not say that this is for children, but that is the intended audience. There are many admirable ideas on this calendar, that would be good for adults to follow through on as well: donating books to a public library or hospital, doing yard work for a neighbor, donating toys to a charity, calling a distant relative, donating food to a local food pantry, paying for a stranger's coffee, taking supplies to the local animal shelter, taking cookies to the fire station. 

What concerns me is some of the other suggestions, things that I think should be happening many times a day every day, 365 days of the year with both adults and children: like smiling at everyone, giving compliments, picking up litter, feeding the birds.  

I am reminded of another occasion, a year or so ago when someone else I know (sadly no longer on my Facebook friends list), when given the task of engaging in a daily single random act of kindness, proudly announced on day one that she had smiled at someone she did not know well, and on day two that she had opened the door for someone else.  Two behaviors that I practice multiple times a day, every day and have since childhood.

I thought at that time, as I think today on seeing this list of ideas, how has it become that behaviors like smiling, being polite, being helpful, that should be part of every one's normal every day behavior, are now being treated as special events that have to have a special holiday designation or done as some random kindness project.  

It seems that kindness like grades has become inflated, one gets more credit than one is due for what should be common daily behavior. 

confessions of a former optimist

I have always been an optimist. Or perhaps I should say I was always an optimist until the last few years. This has little or nothing to do with my personal life experiences. I maintained an optimistic outlook during unemployment, poverty, cancer, divorce, and many other personal trials, and recent years have been kind to my husband and I in many ways. 

Moreover, my optimism had was not based on ignorance of the worlds problems and issues. My parents brought me up to be highly aware of the dire circumstance of poverty, war, brutality, pain and suffering that others in the world suffered. I was brought up to care about and fight for equality, freedom, and opportunity for others. I was a realist optimist. 

I can remember reading Linda Goodman's Sun Signs in high school and she had this very apt description of Aquarius that fit me to a "T": 

"Lots of people like rainbows. Children make wishes on them, artists paint them, dreamers chase them, but the Aquarian is ahead of everybody. He lives on one. What’s more, he’s taken it apart and examined it, piece by piece, color by color, and he still believes in it. It isn’t easy to believe in something after you know what it’s really like, but the Aquarian is essentially a realist, even though his address is tomorrow, with a wild-blue-yonder zip code." 
Goodman, Linda (2011-02-23). Linda Goodman's Sun Signs: Aquarius (Linda Goodman's Sun Signs Set) (Kindle Locations 175-178). RosettaBooks. Kindle Edition. 

Later few years later in college I read Yevegeny Yevtushenko's A Precocious Autobiography  and identified strongly with this passage: 

"My optimism which had been all pink, now had all the colours of the spectrum in it, including black, this is what made it valid and genuine." 

I made my career in sociology a discipline focused on understanding the realities of social life; and I focused on topics of inequality (wealth and poverty), economic and political power (its uses and misuses), and environmental problems. I became more and more versed in what was wrong with human societies, and still I retained optimism that if people properly understood the sources of those problems they could struggle together to make a better world. 

But some where in the past decade, perhaps just the past five years I lost my way. I have come to believe that many of the problems the world is facing can not be fixed, at least not in a way that allows human societies to move forward from where we are now. The inequalities have become so huge, the gaps in power so large, and the many of the environmental problems irreversible without immediate, dramatic reversals in energy, transportation, and food policies that I know will not happen because of those overwhelming inequalities and power differences. 

It feels to me on a daily basis as if those in control of the multinational corporations and the worlds' wealth are deliberately driving humanity towards the edge of destruction, because they believe that there is more profit and more power in creating impoverished and powerless masses, and that the accumulation of vast wealth will some how exempt them from the disasters to come....and who knows, enormous wealth provides a lot of cushion against catastrophe so perhaps they are right. Whether they are right or wrong they are acting as if they, and their children and grandchildren will be immune. 

I do not believe humans are headed to extinction - even as we drive many other species to extinction - but I do believe that we are headed to a lot of hunger, disease and death, and the break down of much of modern industrial society.  

I also believe that within that disaster lies the possibility for vibrant, localized, lower tech, sustainable communities to come out from the other side of the disaster - perhaps many decades on the other side. I also believe that there are people around the world who are doing enormously good things to build social capital, make connections, create local food webs, advance new forms of spirituality  and environmental awareness, and to create support networks that may be the tenuous bridges that we will need to reach that sustainable future on the other side of disaster. 

I know some of those people doing good work and dreaming good dreams. Most of them are far away from me and I only have contact with them through Facebook. It is this lack of direct connection that I think has given birth to my despair.  I want to be part of the bridge building, but no longer know how to make the connections.  I know longer feel it in my soul the way I once did. I feel weighted down by the presence of so many whose response to the uncertainty and fear that they feel in their bones is to cling to a mythical past that never existed and demand that nothing change or that changes should be to a more restrictive, narrower, meaner, less inclusive future. 

Dona Nobis Pacem

A few years ago a remarkable woman by the name of Mimi Lennox had a simple idea, what if at least one day a year millions of people all over the world could focus on just one thought, the thought of peace throughout the world, that perhaps slowly more people would think about peace every day, write about peace, talk about peace and work for peace. Thus was born the Blog Blast for Peace  http://peaceglobegallery.blogspot.com/p/who-we-are.html. 

Has it made any difference in the world? I don't know, but it has made some small difference in my own actions. I don't keep quiet when it comes to issues of war and peace, I make sure that people with the power to make decisions know my thoughts. Does that make a difference to the outcome...it does if enough people speak up. 

So here is my one day reminder, my little mental "tug" to myself for the rest of the year that speaking up for peace in the world is important. That if enough little voices speak up, they become one big voice. 

(I'm posting a little early because I'm too sleepy to stay up till midnight!)

Dona Nobis Pacem

In June of 1965 at Junior High School graduation my  14 year old self spoke to an auditorium of my fellow graduates and called ours "The Hopeful Generation."  Among the things that I thought we had hope for was the curing of disease, the alleviation of poverty and the attainment of world peace.

At age 61 my hope is a little tattered but still there. I think we've made progress on all those fronts. But we still have such a long, long way to go. As long as there are still people who hold these goals we have a chance. That's why I love Blog Blast 4 Peace so much, it tells me that the dream is still alive and that there is still hope.

the time for uncivilization has come

For many years I have believed that we humans, especially those in the advanced, capitalist nations like the United States, were living on the edge of something, a precipice perhaps, or a chaotic whirlpool. We have been brought to this edge by gross disregard of the human and ecological consequences of our civilization's economic, technological and political actions.

In recent months, I have come to believe that we are no long on the edge, but have already crossed over and we are already falling or swirling in uncharted, unfamiliar territory, where the old rules and principles no longer provide us with trustworthy answers (if they ever did).

I believe that a majority of Americans know this in their bones, although they cannot bring themselves to recognize it consciously. It is the source of the profound anxiety, anger, and fear of our age, that manifests itself in a vulnerability to demagoguery, obsession with self-protection ("got to that gun with me to get a cup of coffee"), and xenophobia.

I was pleased to discover yesterday, that there are also a growing number of people who are consciously aware of our crossing over, and the need to respond in transformative ways not driven by fear, but reaching out for community. One place for such people to connect is the Dark Mountain Project whose manifesto is reproduced below:

‘We must unhumanise our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.’

1. We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.
   
2. We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’.
   
3. We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.
   
4. We will reassert the role of story-telling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.
   
5. Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world.
   
6. We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels.
   
7. We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails.
   
8. The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.

"Dark Mountain" photograph by sgreerpitt June 2008, is a mountain top strip mine in Letcher County Kentucky.

Katrina Remembrance

Professional photographer Virginia Hart (a high school friend from California) took photographs of conditions on the Gulf coast in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina for the Red Cross. Below is a collection of moving images to mark the fifth anniversary this August 29th.


YouTube - Katrina Remembrance

Please watch!

one small proposal for gettting from here to there

Our earth is undergoing measurable global climate warming that has a significant anthropogenic component, with the primary anthropogenic contribution to warming coming from the steady increase in CO2 emissions from the use of fossil fuels such as oil and coal. Moreover, warming that has already occurred over the past century and warming that is certain to occur in the next century, have had and will have recognizable negative impacts on the health of human beings and human societies. Those impacts include, but are not limited to, rises in sea level and loss of shoreline, changes in plant and animal populations (declines, increases, shifts in range) including changes in disease vectors (such as West Nile Virus and Malaria carrying mosquitoes), increasing drought with its impact on food crops and human water supplies, and increasing extreme precipitation events with concomitant flooding.

Among the scientific community there is debate and need for continuing research on how much warming and how fast future warming will occur, and the regional patterning of impacts, but there is general consensus on the basic facts of warming and its causes and its consequences. Recent polling of the general population in the United States shows that about three quarters of the American population accept the scientific consensus on the reality of global warming and the anthropogenic causes of that warming. However, there is a decided lack of consensus both within the scientific community and the general population on exactly what should be done to address the problems posed now and in the future by global warming.

Just because people agree that a problem exists and that something should be done, has never meant that they will agree on what to do about that problem. This has always been true. There are lots of good sociological and psychological reasons for this lack of agreement. From a psychological perspective immediate, present threats to one's livelihood and material well-being are more salient and real than predicted future threats no matter how real we consider those future threats to be. A parent will always be more concerned about the present day need to keep a roof over their children's heads and food on the table today, than they will be about the availability of housing and food for those children in 20 years.

From a sociological perspective we have organized our economy around the need to maintain very short term current profitability to retain investors, rather than around long term future. The structures, rules and practices of business decision-making and investor decision-making, make it difficult for either business managers or investors to forgo current profits in exchange for long term sustainability.

For a utility company currently generating most of its electricity from coal fired plants shifting to solar or wind generation has many economic drawbacks. If a utility simply purchases "green" power from another electricity producer who is already invested in wind, solar or hydro-power, the primary profit from power production goes to the actual producer not the utility company purchasing the power. To make any profit, they have to raise the cost of that power to the customer, making it more expensive than the coal generated power, and thus less attractive to consumers of electricity. Such a move also introduces greater inefficiencies -- the further electricity is transmitted the greater the loss, so purchases power from a distant provider means that you get less power for your buck as well.

On the other hand, if a utility company decides to themselves begin producing electricity from wind, solar or hydro sources, there is the huge upfront capital investment that must be made. While this may have great long term profit potential (once constructed one never has to pay for sunlight or wind unlike coal), it has tremendous short term costs that affect profitability and investor satisfaction. If a utility attempts to pay for this by raising utility rates up front, there is substantial customer dissatisfaction, and in states (like Kentucky) with strong political incentives to protect coal, little political interest for public utility commissions to support such rate increases. Additionally, the construction of a centralized solar or wind generation plant requires huge acreage, that may not be readily available to a utility company near its customer base.

Finally, another reason that utility companies become nervous about discussions, is that the idea mode of generating electricity from solar energy is a pattern of dispersed, household level or building level generation, where solar panels sufficient to the needs of a particular housing unit or office building are placed on the building itself. This eliminates two problems: first, all the extra land that would be needed for centralized solar generation, and second, the problem of electricity losses due to transmission over distance. However, since currently housing unit and office building solar electricity generation is financed and operated by individual families or businesses it represents a loss of revenue for the utility company, and certainly not something they really want to encourage.

Moreover, from the point of view of the individual, family or business, the cost of constructing small localized solar (and wind) generation is quite large (at least $20,000), and far beyond the reach of the median household. While such household level solar (and wind) electricity generation does pay for itself over twenty to twenty-five years (the vast majority of the costs are in the initial hardware and installation and after that the electricity itself is essentially free), the upfront costs are prohibitive for all but the most affluent and most environmentally committed.

Now, finally to my proposal. I acknowledge up-front, as a person who is uncomfortable with the power of utility companies now, this is not my ideal solution, but it is a means of decreasing the input of CO2 into the atmosphere, to ameliorate future extent of global warming and its impact, while dealing with many of the problems outlined above. My proposal is that electric utility companies currently heavily invested in their own coal-fired generation consider adopting the model used by Bell Telephone in the 1950's. In exchange for a modest installation fee (say a few hundred dollars that could be prorated over a period of time) well within the budgets of middle and working class families with "green values," the utility company would deliver and install solar panels on the consumers home -- but, and here's what I think is a new idea (at least as applied to electricity generation) the utility company would retain ownership of those panels in perpetuity, and charge the consumer a monthly fee for the electricity consumed from those panels.

Here's the details -- the one's that I think would make this idea appealing to both the consumer and to the utility company. The individual solar installations would 1) be large enough to provide for ordinary, peak daylight hours electricity use and 2) would be tied into the grid allowing for both inflow and outflow. The utility company would benefit, because all excess electricity generated would flow into the grid for use by other customers (and unlike the situation where a household customer owns the solar installation, the utility company would own that excess flow outright and not be paying the customer with the installation for it). With each household or business that added solar generation, the electricity generating capacity of the entire grid would be expanded. The capitalization costs would be spread out over time -- no huge up-front investment in generation capacity years before any new power can be generated. Moreover, following current phone company and cable company practices, the utility company could charge a very small (a few dollars) monthly maintenance fee to consumers, to cover costs of periodic maintenance and repair.

The consumer would benefit in two ways: they would have the assurance that in the absence of sunlight they would still have electricity, and conversely, during widespread power outages due to downed transmission lines they would also still have their locally generated power. Indeed, if several households in a neighborhood had contracted with the utility for solar panels, the entire neighborhood circuit might be protected from electricity loss during a widespread outage.

In the beginning only middle income and upper income families that are highly committed to environmental, "green" values would participate. I know I would. I would be very willing to pay a reasonable premium in installation costs just to be assured that while I was sitting at my computer typing away I was using electricity generated by solar power rather than by coal obtained by scalping the mountains around me. Overtime, as people begin to notice, that one of their neighbors still has electricity after a storm has knocked out everyone else, the appeal of solar panels might spread. If the utility made the cost of electricity generated in situ from the solar panels marginally less expensive (say 1/2 cent per KWH) compared to electricity pulled from the grid, this would increase the appeal of participation.

From the utility company's perspective, they are able to gradually expand their generating capacity, using "green" sources, with small, periodic expenditures of capital that can be partially charged to the customer (installation fees), and also recouped by feeding all excess electricity generated into the grid. Customers without the panels who depended solely on the grid would pay the standard rate for their electricity. By dispersing solar generation through out the households served by a utility, there would be a substantial increase in efficiency, as electricity would be consumed closer to where it was generated, reducing the losses to long distance transmission. Most of all this idea allows utility companies to make the transition to renewable electricity generation gradual and incremental, and thus less painful and more acceptable.

So there is my idea -- somebody tell me what's wrong with it!

how shall we live? part 1

My attention has returned in recent days to a theme that has long concerned me, a theme that has popped up in several very interesting blogs.

Will of Zen Agnostic sums this theme up nicely in this quote:

"most of what the doctors are calling mental illness, clinical depression, neurotic behavior - this not illness. It is a natural reaction to an insane culture and a dying planet....Part of the problem in this insane screwed up world is that people can't be open about their grief and anger. Our emotions are natural and healthy - but society at large labels us as unhealthy if we don't put on a smile every day and joke about the weather and sports and the latest celebrity DUI arrest. Simply writing about it, naming it, not hiding from it, is an act of resistance."

Over at CommonDreams.org Robert Jenson writes:

"To be fully alive today is to live with anguish, not for one's own condition in the world but for the condition of the world, for a world that is in collapse."

And Dave Pollard at how to save the world writes of the dissonance between the messages from our bodies (physical survival, avoidance of pain, procreation of our genetic material), our culture (values, beliefs, attitudes and norms), and from our environment or biosphere which he labels gaia. Dave argues that:

"this dissonance is paralyzing; it renders us ill, physically and mentally, and ultimately we get exhausted trying to handle it so we become desensitized, shut down."

Like these three bloggers, everything I know, everything I study as a sociologist, as a observer of human society and culture, suggest to me a world in collapse, that has already "overshot" the material basis (resources, food, energy) on which its existence depends. I strongly recommend reading the work of Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows, The Limits to Growth (1972), Beyond the Limits (1992) and The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update (2004). Meadows, Randers and Meadows wrote in their first book (1972) that:

"If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next 100 years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrolled decline in both population and industrial capacity."

By 1992, Meadows, Randers and Meadows were convinced that those limits had already been reached in several areas (for example world wide grain production peaked in the 1980's), and by 2004 the conclude that we were approaching other limits much faster than their original hundred year time line.

Most people in modern industrial societies have lost awareness of how deeply the health of society is tied to the health of the environment. They think of our technology as lifting us above the vicissitudes of weather and changes in climate. Yet all one has to do is examine the extent to which "normal" daily activities in our society are fouled up and even stop dead, when it gets too snowy or too hot, or when a hurricane stops the pumping of oil for the Gulf, to realize that our technology has made our societies more rather than less vulnerable to changes in our environment.

We are on a path that is unsustainable in human social terms, not just in environmental terms. The two are so intimately intertwined that we cannot deal with one without dealing with the other. Our economy is not only unsustainable in terms of its use of resources and energy, but it is unstable and unsustainable in terms of the ever increasing disparity between the tiny percentage whose wealth is growing and the other 95 percent whose wealth is declining. We are impoverishing our people and our society as well as our ecosystems and biosphere.

[I realize that this is a larger topic than I can do in one post, given all the other immediate deadlines in my life, so I'm going to make this a multi-part post, with this installment just identifying the problem and linking to some great blogs. more on the actual question posed in the title another day.]

singing the truth together

I recently I discovered a very early book, After Long Silence, by my favorite science fiction writer Sheri Tepper. In the story, humans have settled on a world they view as devoid of sentience, but which is inhabited by at least two sentient races--one huge crystalline entities, and the other small, furry, mammalian creatures called "viggy" by the humans. Through the viggy, Tepper critiques certain aspects of humanity by posing a more attractive alternative. Here is an extended quote, that I think says something extraordinarily valuable about communication and truth, and the error of human ways:

"Memory is a strange thing. A viggy would experience a thing and remember it. Another viggy would experience the same happening and remember it as well. And yet the two memories would not be the same. On a night of shadow and wind, one viggy might sing that he had seen the spirit of his own giligee [nanny], beckoning from beside a Jubal tree. Another viggy might sing he had seen only the wind, moving a veil of dried fronds. What had they seen, a ghost or the fronds? Where was the truth in memory? Somewhere between the spirit and the wind...

When the troupe traveled down a tortuous slope, one would remember pain, another joy. After a mating, one would remember giving, another would remember loss. No one view would tell the truth of what occurred, for truth always lay at the center of many possibilities.

Many views yield the truth...This was the first commandment of the Prime Song. Only when a happening had been sung by the troupe, sung in all its various forms and perceptions, could the truth be arrived at. Then dichotomy could be harmonized, opposition softened, varying views brought into alignment with one another so that all aspects of truth were sung."

One of the benefits of blogging (and Facebook) for me has been not just singing my song of my life, but having others who were present sing their song back to me, and I come to see how limited my own perspective was then and continues to be. Often just the fact of writing things down, has opened my eyes to not just the possibility of other perspectives, but of the great likelihood that my perspective was seriously flawed, limited and self-absorbed. Having high school and college friends respond with their own memories has enriched my understanding in ways I never anticipated.

I don't think that this search for truth together means that all perspectives are equally valid. For example, there are always those students who insist "I don't care what the statistics say, divorce HAS to be increasing." [It's not by the way, it has been declining since 1981, and is lower today than it was in 1967]. But it is worth us trying to discover together what it is about their life experience that makes them feel as if the divorce rate were increasing.

We appear to be at a juncture in our social and political history, when the lessons of the viggy might be good ones to remember.

spay or neuter your pet and take in a stray today!!

Someone posed a question on one of my posts about Tabitha and the kittens (Tippy, Ty, Eli and Sammi). It was a very good question about why had my cat had kittens, and whether these kittens were going to keep on reproducing. Here's my response:

None of "my" cats have kittens, they are all neutered and spayed at six months or as soon as they come into my home if they are older. Tabitha was a stray that took up residence under my house during the very cold winter (through a hole that has since been blocked). I don't know who her putative owners were, but they were irresponsible, not only for not having her spayed, but also for not providing adequate shelter from winter weather.

For three months she lived under my house and was so scared that the minute the front door opened she disappeared under the house. I never got within 20 feet of her (and had no idea of her gender) from December through March; much less be able to capture her and engage in preventative medical intervention. Then one day, instead of running away she ran to me and rubbed all over me, wanting to be picked up. The reason was obvious -- she was hugely pregnant (nearly 50 days as it turned out).

The only choice (to me) was to take her in, and care for her and the kittens. There are no animal shelters of any kind in our county, and none in the region either public or Humane Society, that take cats. And only one distant one that takes dogs. I resent the fact that other people are not as responsible with their pets as my husband and I are. Eastern Kentucky has a huge cat and dog over-population problem. Not only do strays wander about, but even most cats and many dogs that have "owners" wander around lose, able (and of course willing) to reproduce at will.

There are good responsible people in my county, who not only take care of their own animals, but who also work hard to raise money and awareness. Efforts are underway to raise money to build a shelter in our county, but bad economic times make that difficult. In the meantime the only real alternative is to take care of strays oneself.

The medical care that we will provide for Tabitha and her kittens includes an appointment (made the day that the kittens were born) for Mama Tabitha to be spayed and the kittens to get their first shots. That will happen next week. The kittens will be spayed or neutered in five months time.

The kittens like Tabitha will become part of my household, bringing up to 11 the total cat population. They will have food and shelter, and good veterinary care for the rest of their lives. We had really hoped to allow our cat population to decline through natural attrition (old age). So that by the time I retired we would be catless. But fate sent Tabitha our way, and we could not turn our backs. Nor could we just keep putting out food and providing a sanctuary (under our house) for continued reproduction.

The compensation for acting responsibly is that for the first time in 13 years we get to enjoy the wonder and joy of kittens.

meet Tabitha

This is Tabitha. I just named her one week ago, when I got my first good look at her -- and realized she was a "she" and that she was profoundly pregnant. Before that she was just a flash of white that disappeared as soon as I opened the front door.

I first saw Tabitha last year hanging around a house at the bottom of our lane (we have a neighbor who will feed strays but never gets them spayed or neutered nor provides them shelter). Back in October when it first started to get cold she started taking refuge on occasion in the crawl space under our trailer. I never saw more than the top of her head as she would whisk out of sight under the house, whenever I'd come out.

As the winter wore on and got colder and snowier she started spending all her time under our house -- our dog Rosie would catch her smell coming up through the heating vents and freak out. On the very coldest nights and days we'd hear banging and clanging echoing through the heating vents. My best guess of what was going on was that Tabitha had dug into the insulation up next to the vent.

I started putting dry food out on a table on the porch in late December when I realized that she didn't seem to be going down the hill any more. The food would disappear when I wasn't looking.

Then last week, suddenly, Tabitha, not only didn't disappear when I came out, she came up on the porch and jumped up on the table while I put out the food. Over the last week, I started giving her wet food twice a day, and she became ever more friendly. I stayed awake half the night last night trying to decide what to do.

I'm just not the kind of person who can just ignore things like this, and not just because I realized that the smell and sound of kittens born under the house would turn my poor doggy frantic. This is not an easy decision. We've had as many as 14 cats at one time; that was 13 years ago, the last time a neighborhood tabby had kittens on my front porch and we took them in -- the last of whom, James Tyler, died just a few weeks ago. We still have six very elderly cats several with expensive, and time consuming chronic illnesses. We have given up a very large portion of our family income to care for animals that were all strays or abandoned. Money that might have been spent to fix the occasionally leaking roof, or the floors (which have odd boards cobbled over gaping holes), replace the toilets that have to be flushed with buckets, or save up for the inevitable day that the 30+ year furnace bites the dust. The good news -- we don't have to worry about the animals doing damage to our house, its falling apart all on its own!

But this morning, when I went out to put out a bowl of food for Tabitha, she not only came up on the porch for food as she's been doing for the past six days, she suddenly started rubbing all over me, and let me pick her up and pet her. I stood out on the damp, chilly porch in my nightgown and sweatshirt, holding this hugely pregnant purring cat, and made the decision just like that. She was coming in, becoming part of the family.

For the moment, Tabitha has a nice cozy cage with make-shift litter box, water and food, and a nice cozy nest, in our "junk" room. I had to move a lot of junk this morning to make a place. She seems to like it. I gave her several hours this evening to explore the room both with me present and on her own, before settling her back in the cage. She's extremely affectionate. In the top picture she's sitting in my lap -- her idea.

Tomorrow she pay a brief visit to our vet, to be tested for Feline Leukemia and other diseases before I turn her lose with our other cats. I put in an order with Pet Smart for a new, slightly larger, roomier cage, where she can give birth to her kitties. The cage is more for their protection than anything else, as we are not quite sure how our dog Rosie will react.

So as of today we have seven cats, and within a few days to week we'll have even more. I love kittens and cats. But I sure wish that other people in the world and in my neighborhood in particular would do their part to spay and neuter and provide adequate shelter and proper food for animals. I also wish I'd win the lottery. I probably have about as much chance of getting the latter wish as the former one.

Southeast Whitesburg Mural--41 The Big Reveal

Today was the day, the big 20th anniversary celebration and the unveiling of the plaques, the naming of the buildings, the thanking of the donors, and the honoring of the honorees.

Although it was not in the program, the college's president Dr. W. Bruce Ayers asked me to come up and speak. I've known the man for 13 years, and know he likes to do things like that so I'd given at least a few minutes this morning to think about what I might like to say to people, but mostly I spoke what came to me in the moment. I don't entirely remember what I said, but it evidently hit just the right tone, because people kept commenting on it.

There were lots of great moments as people spoke with great emotion about their passion for the college. Our campus exists because a group of dedicated and visionary local people managed to raise a million dollars in donations and pledges in less than one week. Penny Ritter Combs one of stalwarts of this visionary group described clambering up on strip-jobs to get donations from coal companies during that week. The plaque below is a special tribute Penny and her parents Judge James M and Atha Caudill who not only dreamed of a college, but who have continued to work for twenty years to make that dream an on-going reality.



My favorite moment in the ceremony came when a former student of mine, Melanie Watts sang the song "Anyway." Melanie has an extraordinary voice, pure and rich, but she clearly felt this song deeply which made her performance deeply moving. I'd never heard it before, but I can tell you before this day is out I'm going to have a copy of Martina McBride's performance of "Anyway" on my iPod! [The link is to YOUTube video of the McBride performing the song]. The key refrain and guiding idea of the song comes from a poem often attributed to Mother Teresa (because it was inscribed on a wall of Mother Teresa's children's home in Calcutta), but is actually credited to Kent M. Keith and called The Paradoxical Commandments.

So here is the whole thing, finished, with the plaque in place:



The top photo, while taken with my camera was shot by my colleague Ron Brunty, so I could be in the shot. The other photos are by me.

Rosh Hashanah

"HAYOM HARAT OLAM: Today is the birthday of the world." So it declares during the shofar (rams horn trumpet) service on Rosh Hashanah.

There are many themes twining through Rosh Hashanah. One important theme, as one might expect for the "birthday of the world" is creation. But the High Holidays Makhzor* reminds us:

"Creation, we are taught is not an act that happened once upon a time, once and for ever. The act of bringing the world into existence is a continuous process. God called the world into being, and that call goes on. There is this present moment because God is present. Every instant is an act of creation. A moment is not a terminal but a flash, a signal of Beginning. Time is a perpetual innovation, a synonym for continuous creation. Time is God's gift to the world of space."(page 329)

The Makhzor also tells us:

"Moreover, our Sages taught, the human being is "God's partner in the work of Creation." He and we create together. There is still much work to be done: disease to be conquered, injustice and poverty to be overcome, hatred and war to be eliminated. There is truth to be discovered, beauty to be fashioned, freedom to be achieved, peace and righteousness to be established. There is a great need to dedicate all the creative power which a creating God has given us, so that we may join Him in 'the continuing work or Creation.'" (page 149)

So Rosh Hashanah is a day to rededicate ourselves to being co-creators of the Universe, partners with G-d.

*Makhzor is a transliteration into English of the Hebrew word used for the book which contains the order of service, all the prayers, songs, poems (psalms), and teachings for Jewish services. The Makhzor used by my congregation, B'nai Sholom, is Makhzor Khadash/The New Makhzor for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, complied and edited by Rabbi Sidney Greenberg and Rabbi Jonathan D. Levine, The Prayer Book Press of Media Judaica, Inc. 1978.

One Single Impression -- Thirst

thirst for knowledge
reaching out in myriad
ways, questioning all.


©sgreerpitt
Thursday September 17, 2009

For other (much better) poems on the prompt "thirst" see One Single Impression.

Can't Afford to Wait...

My best friend Betti after nearly 40 years of working, but not old enough for Medicare, who struggles to pay increasingly higher and higher premiums and deductables in the thousands of dollars and wait for the day that she'll be denied coverage because of the chronic diseases that come with aging...The father of one of my students who has a mass on his skull that he can't afford to have x-rayed or catscanned or biopsied because he has no insurance...and so many others whose stories are heartrending...they need a public option NOW!

One Single Impression -- Fragrance

Contrasts

How welcome,
sweet stale
smell of
rain
on summer dust
and sizzling
pavement,
a sigh of relief
from summer
heat.

Sodden reek,
muddy debris,
when long
the rains,
and bare
the hills.

sgreerpitt
Sunday July 26, 2009

You can read and see a bit more about our Sunday flood in the post below. You can read more (and nicer) poems on the prompt "fragrance" at One Single Impression.

Mine is only one of thousands of families impacted by the negative consequences of mountain top removal strip mining. Please learn more about this devastating mining technique and add your voice to those asking for stricter controls, and an end to the most destructive practices. Check out the I Love Mountains website. This isn't a "tree hugger" issue, its a people lover issue!! My family is lucky, only our yard and driveway (and peace of mind) are damaged this time. Many people lose their homes and their health as the result of mountain top removal strip-mining.

One Single Impression -- Blue Rain

Two Haiku


muddy torrents dash
dreams, sweep hope and life away
--excesses of spring.


***


destructive water
pours off denuded mountains
--legacy of coal.






"Clean coal" is a dangerous myth. Help stop mountain top removal mining. Call your representative to support the Clean Water Protection Act. Learn more about the devastating way in which coal is mined today at http://www.ilovemountains.org/, and what you can do to stop it.

Photo by sgreerpitt June 17, 2009 in Letcher County Kentucky.

For more poems on the prompt "Blue Rain" check out One Single Impression.

relay for life

Twenty seven years and one month ago, I was diagnosed with malignant melanoma. Thanks to educational materials from the American Cancer Society, I had spotted the change in my mole immediately, got treatment early, and became a long term cancer survivor. The educational role of the American Cancer Society is one reason why I have been a supporter of that organization for many years.

During those 27 years unfortunately a very long list of friends and relatives have not survived cancer. Among those whose memories I donate to the ACS are: my aunt Mildred Greer French who died from multiple forms of cancer including a melanoma brain tumor 7 years before my own diagnosis, my cousin Becky Crittenden who died from breast cancer in her mid-thirties leaving behind a husband and two small children, my dear friend Andy's wife Juliet Singer who died from relatively rare uterine tumor when their daughter was two, one of my best friends Ellen Hoffman a life long non-smoker and professor of communications at University of Pittsburgh Johnstown from lung cancer in her forties, my father-in-law Jimmy Pitt who died of lung cancer.

Over the past decades I have regularly donated to the ACS and to several breast cancer organizations, but I had never participated in a Relay for Life event or been a member of a relay team. This year for the first time in nearly a decade some of my friends at the college were motivated to create a relay team -- driven largely by the hard work and enthusiasm of Mitch Caudill who has been the single thread of continuity in our campus's tiny library through a revolving door of six professional librarians in 13 years. The tall guy at the survivor's table is Mitch.

Mitch convinced me to acknowledge myself as a survivor and participate in the survivor ceremonies. At first I was reluctant to do so. Since I was vigilant and caught my melanoma early, I did not have to suffer through chemo or radiation. Sure, I'd had a potentially very deadly form of cancer, and it had made an indelible imprint on me and how I viewed life, but I felt like I'd gotten off easy. But with Mitch's encouragement I did participate, and it was an incredibly meaningful experience to be up on that stage, to listen to all the others' stories and briefly share my own. Turns out there were four other malignant melanoma survivors in the group.

After the survivor ceremonies came the rest of the (very, very long) night. I don't know how Relay is done outside of eastern Kentucky, but here, the Relay lasts from six PM to six AM. This was the first time in nearly twenty years that I stayed awake all night (either by design or by insomnia). While everyone does some walking on the track, and relay teams try to keep at least one member walking through at least the first two-thirds of the night, the walking part of the relay tends to be played down here, with more emphasis on "spirit" through a variety of games and activities. What we lacked in experience (almost all of the other teams had been participating for many years), we made up for in enthusiasm. The photo (left) shows several of my team mates working on the words to our own Relay relevant words set to "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree." For almost no rehearsal, we gave a pretty credible performance.

After about midnight, there was considerable attrition around the Relay track, the majority of non-team members -- children/parents/friends -- went home to bed, and even a fairly large number of team members gave up and went home. In several cases entire teams left. Our group dwindled from 11 team members and about 20 family members to just six dedicated team members. By sheer coincidence, our chosen Relay night, turned out to be misty and unseasonably cold: thermometer readings stayed in the low 50's, but a brisk little wind from about 2 AM on was chilling. None of us had really come prepared for the weather, we all had sweatshirts, and light throws, when what we need were jackets, hats, gloves and sleeping bags or quilts. A fire would have really been welcome. Also we'd brought lots of food, but it was all summer time, cold fair -- there were a LOT of left over ice cold beverages, but no one had any hot drinks.

The best part of the experience was getting the chance to talk to and get to know one of my fellow workers -- Angela. Angela and I are the same age. We first met when Angela's daughter Sandy was one of my students at my previous job -- a college in near by Virginia. Then six years after Sandy was my student, she became my office mate at Southeast for seven years until a new building was completed that gave us all separate offices. A couple of years ago, Angela who had worked as a nurses aid for most of her career, came to work at the college in the maintenance department. I see Angela almost every day, but she has little time to talk, as the maintenance department is vastly understaffed and overworked. Being more than a decade older than our other team members, Angela and I teamed up to walk together, and huddle against the cold together.

Relay night was a rewarding experience and one that I would not have missed. I especially treasure the time spent with Angela and the other members of my team. However, I think next year I'm going to donate money, and stay at home to sleep in my own comfortable bed!

The Wilderness of Spring

My fellow blogger, e.r.dunhill, at Blue Island Almanack has a wonderful post today "Where the Wild Things Are" that tells about the National Wildlife Federation's certified wildlife habitat program for individuals and organizations.

I was so excited when I read this. We have about 3/4 an acre with a lot of mature trees (and plenty of young one's too), tangled thickets of blackberry and wild rose, blow-downs (from last summer's storms), and unmown islands of native plants around our big trees. We have lots of plants that provide pollen, seeds, and even berries.

I followed the link and discovered that our property already qualifies to be certified, and was already to click the button, donate, and get a sign. Then I discovered that what I consider deliberate choices to provide good land stewardship and habitat, my husband as a badge of shame.

John thinks he's suppose to have a yard that looks like those of everyone else in the neighborhood -- with nature properly beaten into submission. He fears that the neighbors will think that the reason our yard doesn't look like all the neighbors' yards is because he is too lazy to take care of it. It would seem that despite his conversion to Buddhism, that old Protestant work ethic still has him firmly in its grip.

So he doesn't want a sign that would call attention to our yard. I thought it would be a good thing to generate questions and perhaps create "teaching moments." But the last thing John wants is for anyone to ask him about his yard.

Part of the problem with changing to a greener, more environmentally sound society is that so many Americans hold cultural values and attitudes that put them at odds with nature. Nature is viewed as the enemy of civilization. My husband is only one of millions of men in America (and dozens in our neighborhood) who equate responsible middle/working class masculine adulthood with beating back nature so create a manicured lawn.

Please check out erd's post, and click on the links. You too many have a yard that is already a wildlife habitat, or can achieve this with some minimal effort. It's a worthy activity, whether or not you get your habitat certified.

One Single Impression -- Circles

Cycles of nature,
cycles of life,
beginning to end,
beginning again,
renewal, rebirth.

Rhythm of life,
breathing it in,
breathing it out,
oxygen to carbon,
feeding the grass.

Make the link,
draw the connection,
giving in measure
as you received,
sharing the wisdom
sharing the wealth.

©sgreerpitt
Sunday, March 01, 2009

Graphic is a diagram I created for SOC 260 Population, Resources and Change in 1999.

Celebrate the one year anniversary of One Single Impression and enjoy other poems on the theme "circles."