Happy solstice! In honor of the turning of the year, which happens tonight at 10:30 p.m. where I live, here are some photos I took early one magical morning a week or so ago when frost had decorated the snow.
Grasses, frost, and snow
A crop of crystals
Frost on snowfield
So I’m at a party a dozen years ago in Oakland, California—I think it’s in my own living room, though I can’t remember for sure. Downstairs the salsa music is blaring, but up here people are gathered in threes and fours chatting. I join a few friends grouped around a man I just met.
“Well, Saul,” one of them is asking, “how is your research going? Have you discovered anything exciting lately?”
Everybody grins. Put the scientist on the spot. This is what party talk sounds like when there’s a physicist in the crowd.
Kepler's Supernova, from Wikimedia
Saul’s face lights up. “As a matter of fact,” he replies, beaming, “we do have some exciting news. We all know that the universe is expanding, right? But we always thought that the speed of expansion was slowing down. Well, we’re just now finding out”—he pauses for dramatic effect, his face glowing—”that it’s not slowing down at all! In fact, it’s speeding up!”
Yes, it’s finished! The project that consumed me for most of the past two years (and much of several years before that) is safely in the publisher’s hands. Best of all, the editor has glowing words to say about it and feels it will be helpful to many people. I couldn’t hope for better. The pub date is not yet set, but as soon as it is, believe me, I’ll pass it along!
In the weeks since pressing “send” on the manuscript, I’ve had some time to reflect on the strange experience of writing a book—and a few things about the end of the process that surprised me.
Paul Stamets, the visionary mycologist, or mushroom biologist, recently appeared again at the national Bioneers conference. I’ve been following Stamets’s work for some time, and so I eagerly watched his presentation—and then watched it again. The deep wisdom of fungi might just help save life on Earth as we know it.
For those of us not so intimate with fungi, the ones known as mycorrhizal fungi exist underground as a fine network of filaments running through the soil. They may live for tens or hundreds of years digesting oxygen and filtering water and creating conditions ripe for other life before they appear as an above-ground mushroom.
Through this latticework of filaments, nuclei are constantly flowing. Here is a still from a microscopic film (made by Dr. Patrick Hickey of Edinburgh) that traces the movements of nuclei along the filaments:
Captured from Paul Stamets's Bioneers presentation
In a word: health. The health of the planet.
Put simply, a huge gap between the fabulously wealthy and everyone else is bad for the planet. Why? Because such a system is wasteful and costly.
It’s wasteful because it allows some to have way, way more than they need to live well and in doing so to continue raiding the planet for resources. It’s costly because waste is always costly.
At last the American people are waking up to what the statistics have been showing for decades already: the gap between the wealthy and the rest in this country is astounding—and rapidly growing. According to the CIA World Factbook, income distribution in the United States is worse than India, not so bad as Brazil, but significantly worse than European countries. On a par with Mexico—except Mexico is moving toward greater equality while we’re going in the opposite direction.
Note from Priscilla: Slow money is about putting your money where your mouth is, says guest writer Julene Bair. It’s about attracting investment to entrepreneurs, including farmers, who are promoting healthy, local food supplies. This upcoming conference brings together people who love the land and are seeking new ways to channel financial resources toward healthier lands and foods. This is cross-posted at Big Picture Agriculture.
I’ve scattered throughout her post some photos I took in September at the Red Wagon Organic Farm, where I am a CSA subscriber. Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is one way to support slow food. Here is the soil where my vegetables grew!
Slow Money October Gathering Offers Ways to Invest in Slow Food
by Julene Bair
Food security, whether it’s on the personal or international level, is too important to be taken for granted. This is true especially now, when food systems are threatened by 
chemical pollution, the loss of topsoil, and the limits of aquifers and oil. The Slow Food movement offers a promising response to these perils. That we should slow down, grow some of our own food, buy locally what we can’t grow ourselves, and cook using whole foods instead of opening cans or buying fast food burgers not only makes health sense. Our future depends on it. When most of the oil is gone, and it becomes too expensive to ship food from across the world, how else will our children and grandchildren eat?
We headed up to the national forest yesterday, just outside Rocky Mountain National Park. The aspens were glorious, at their peak in many places. Heading onto a rough and pitted dirt road, we found beautiful stands of trees twinkling in the October sun.
Don’t let this dirt road fool you; just out of sight it rose sharply and began to attack the underside of the car:
I took part in a wonderful celebration of birds tonight—five writers sharing their poems and prose about birds. Called “For the Birds: A Flock of Writers Read about All Things Avian,” the reading was organized by Ellen Orleans as part of “Bird Shift,” an exhibit on birds commissioned by the EcoArts Connections and held at the CU Museum of Natural History. We gathered in a large circle at the museum, munched cookies and sipped tea, and were inspired by other bird-watchers and bird lovers. Here is the piece I read.
Company
August 2011
I caught sight of it before my dog did—a fledgling robin struggling in the grass. As we approached, the robin shuffled hastily across the sidewalk, dragging a wing. Uh-oh, I thought. Not good.
I dropped Bodhi’s leash and bent over the robin. My hands remembered how to pluck a bird gently from the ground, palms firm but loose around the middle to calm and protect fragile wings.
The robin stretched out its beak and clamped down on my finger. Its best effort barely hurt. I extracted my finger and hugged the fluffy body carefully to my chest, then tucked my open shirt around its head to dampen sights and sounds. With my other hand I picked up the leash and headed home.
After packing the robin in a shoebox, I drove to Greenwood Wildlife Center, where the young woman behind the desk took a brief look inside the box then handed it off to someone from the back. “Intensive care,” she called after the retreating box.
Hummingbird nest soft with down on the inside and woven with paint chip decorations on the outside, all held together with spiderweb threads.
The bustle at Greenwood was familiar from the several years I spent volunteering at a wildlife clinic in the Bay Area. The faces were familiar too. Wildlife rehabbers have calm, matter-of-fact faces. Like the farmers of my childhood, these faces have watched birth—and death—many times over.
