Gratitude List

Practicing gratitude is a good way to stop allowing the wonderful aspects of life slip by without awareness. The Dalia Lama has spent his life offering his encouragement for us to practice it, the Buddha taught it to his disciples over 2,000 years ago and now science is finding more and more evidence to support the notion that gratitude is a great source of well being and happiness.

Over the past few years a group of friends and I have been working on making lists of things that we are grateful for. For enumeration, and that possibility that it may inspire others to start their own lists, I offer a few gems:

Maine 2013: The way leaves dance in a light breeze; orange evening beams of sunlight moving through the room, peanut butter and butter on fresh baked bread, aimlessness, new seedlings in the garden, beansprouts and cherry tomatoes, pet names from my mother.

Arizona 2013: Waking up without an alarm, rainy afternoons, sparkly shoes, watching the sunset, unexpected letters, breathing in & loving out, pint-sipping, misty midnight walks, giving compliments, that feeling you get when you can't imagine anything better, the way fall air smells, snuggling under the covers, mischievous smirks, snort-y laughing, being in the moment.

New Mexico 2012: Alpaca gatherings, alpaca eyelashes, buffalo roving, yellow aspen groves, yellow tea cup, bicycles, sweet rainbow children, the fuzzy grey of the changing season.

Seattle 2012: Stars, lightning bugs, robots, history, gifts, love, giggle, farts, dancing, sleep.

Nevada 2011: Baked sweet potatoes, truck campers, the Sierras, smooth tapioca pudding, peanut brittle, homemade apple butter, jars of change, winds of change, seasons that change, sweat pants.

New Jersey 2011: Gathering and eating food from our garden, grieving in order to move through, time alone, eggs and bacon, discovering new music, cartwheeling everywhere!

Scotland 2010: Making big plans and changing them at the last second, cutting off all my hair, the sun rising after I've lost track of time, remembering the magic of hot tea.

Arizona 2010: Rawberry strubarb pie, homemade earl gray rock candy experiments, Arizona evenings, suited up for tennis, rocking chairs and turkey vultures, never-ending fire roasted pablanos, gathering the bundle of your mind into this present moment.

California 2010: Deep breaths to bring me back to the present, sweet rose wine and rocking chairs, grounding ideas born long ago, calligraphic ink stained fingers, the rat's nest treasure, yoni art, reunions with east coast birds, homemade felt for yurt homes, dark mustaches forever in my heart.

Wisconsin 2009: Listening to my kids pretend stuff.

Vermont 2009: Falling asleep with my new born nephew in my arms, opening my heart to give and receive love, visits from close friends that live far away, sitting by a warm wood stove, midnight strolls under a clear sky, snuggling in my warm bed on a cold morning.

Georgia 2008: Translucent Bunny ears, silk dog fur, coarse dog fur, wild heavy rain, hail, very late night quiet.

New York 2008: Yoga interrupted by puppies, yoga interrupted by the smell of coffee, the smell of coffee, enjoying coffee while writing about yoga being interrupted, laughing at myself and this list, anticipating having fun in the theatre later, anticipating more laughing at myself.

What to do?

I just watched the Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society, Wade Davis's, TED talks again. They are very impressive but left me wondering if the current approach to collecting and preserving indigenous knowledge is really useful for these communities or just ego based materialism and misguided do-goody-ness.

There is no doubt that there is an unfortunate chasm between the indigenous communities interests and the interests of the research community. - It leaves an aspiring do-goody human ecologist with strong consideration of 'turning on, tuning in, and dropping out'.

San Francisco Zen Center's Reb Anderson asks if these doubt questions are 'apropos of peace' he suggests that they are not but that 'being' with these questions and 'standing beside' them is apropos of peace.

I relaxed into Reb's lessons and then relaxed even more when I found this poem by Mary Oliver called When I Am Among the Trees:

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness,
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, "Stay awhile."
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, "It's simple," they say,
"and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine."

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Our Island Earth

Anyone who has spent a significant portion of time looking at maps will probably agree that the Mercator projection is a poor representation of the globe. The Mercator projection is disorienting at best, it stretches Northern countries to look massive and places the north pole, Europe and North America as a kind of gigantic roof over the world.

Buckminster Fuller also found this to be a let down. He believed that this projection worked to further the disparity between the global north and global south and so he created a new kind of projection. He called his projection a dymaxion map, projecting the earths surface onto a grid of triangles and then laying them out flat (an unfolded icosahedron).


Looking at this realistic map of the earth brings great relief. One gets the feeling that we are in Pangea still. It shows all the continents stretched across with the north pole in the center, creating a kind of "Reunite Laurasia" or "Reunite Gandwanaland" map but in real time.

Here is a poem by Mary Oliver, not about about this amazing little blue planet of ours but about that giant orb of fire that makes all this blue and green possible.

THE SUN

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone—
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance—
and have you ever felt for anything

such wild love—
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed—

or have you too
turned from this world—

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

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Here is a regularly updated list of other things Cory writes

The Tongue Says Lonelines

Just heard this poem from Jane Hirshfield and was moved to put it up here.



The Tongue Says Lonelines

The tongue says loneliness, anger, grief,
but does not feel them.

As Monday cannot feel Tuesday,
nor Thursday
reach back to Wednesday
as a mother reaches out for her found child.

As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.

Not a bell,
but the sound of the bell in the bell-shape,
lashing full strength with the first blow from inside the iron.

~ Jane Hirshfield
from Come, Thief

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Here is a regularly updated list of other things Cory writes

Nature Always WIns

I just finished reading Verlyn Klinkenborg's inspirational piece in Environment 360 on yale.edu 'The Folly of Big Agriculture: Why Nature Always Wins'.

Klinkenborg has written a beautiful treatise against the mainstream of industrial agriculture and in favor of nature.

"...nature's big idea is to try out life wherever and however it can be tried, which means everywhere and anyhow. The result — over time and at this instant — is diversity, complexity, particularity, and inventiveness to an extent our minds are almost unfitted to conceive."

He goes on to say that we really ought to be rethinking the way we do agriculture.

"A reasonable agriculture would do its best to emulate nature."

Read the article at yale.edu: http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_folly_of_big_agriculture_why_nature_always_wins/2514/

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Here is a regularly updated list of other things Cory writes

Tar Sands in Maine

The Sierra Club Maine and the First Parish Church Environmental Justice team are co-sponsoring a public forum on Thursday, November 29th at 7PM in Fellowship Hall in Pilgrim House of the First Parish Church (on Cleaveland Street, Brunswick).

They will talk about a proposed plan to pump tar sands (diluted bitumen) through a 60 year old pipeline from Canada through Maine's Lakes Region, past Sebago Lake and to Portland Harbor and then shipment on Casco Bay.

The forum will feature a presentation about the realities and risks of shipping tar sands through pipelines, including the economic and environmental impacts to communities on and near the pipeline route from Bethel to South Portland and the impacts on climate change. Presenters include: Glen Brand, Director of the Sierra Club Maine, and Montreal attorney, Shelley Kath, who is a Senior Consultant for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington DC.

Please go and invite friends in the community.

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Here is a regularly updated list of other things Cory writes

Nordic ethnobotany and conservation

Hotspots of biodiversity continue to be the focus of conservation efforts and ethnobotany explorations around the world. This makes sense since hotspots are the places that harbor the majority of the world's species. However, loss of species and habitats also happens in “cold-spots” of biodiversity such as Iceland and the Faroe Islands. I happen to be from one of these cold-spots and have witnessed a big loss of biodiversity in my lifetime. 

I used the opportunity of my Masters Thesis work at University of Kassel, Witzenhausen to find out about more about how other people from cold-spots use native biodiversity and if there is any relationship between use and conservation. I was inspired by David Quammen's ideas about Island Biogeography, so eloquently expressed in his book 'Song of the Dodo' and by Karl Hammer's various articles and books on the ethnobotany of Italian Islands. 

My 'explorations', if I can call them that, took place back in 2009 but have since been published in the journal Human Ecology as well as the open access archive Organic eprints. I thought it might be a good idea to share a bit about them here for any interested friends.

Icelanders and Faroese live in fragile ecosystems that have been changed since the Vikings cut many of the forests and then introduced rooting and grazing of livestock changing the forests to grazing lands around 1,000 years ago. Today there are many conservation minded islanders that are attempting to generate a more sustainable relationship with their environment. I was hosted by the people of Slow Food Iceland and Terra Madre Nordic to name a few and funded by the Partridge Foundation and my alma mater College of the Atlantic. I spent the summer of 2009 learning from Icelandic and Faroese wild collectors about their use of plants as well as algae and fungi for food and medicine. 

Some of the species like the Angelica, Birch and Icelandic Moss are used by many people. These are important and their habitats are often conserved by the people who like to use them.

A lot of the people I spoke with feel that the potential exists for a more diverse harvest and for sustainable management (e.g. Organic certification). Also spreading knowledge about the use of these species can increase their cultural conservation. This seems to be largely about food, which appears to be paramount for increasing the cultural importance of a species.

Organic eprints http://orgprints.org/22897/

Human Ecology doi 10.1007/s10745-012-9517-0

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Here is a regularly updated list of other things Cory writes