Transitioning

Here's a great video on the need for Transitions, as mentioned in my previous post.

State of the World: A Year End Review

I've just finished reading State of the World 2010: Transforming Cultures: From Consumerism to Sustainability. Although I haven't quite formulated it yet, my New Year's resolution will certainly involve taking the book's message to heart.

I decided to read this because it's been nearly ten years since my environmental epiphany and I needed to do some deep thinking on this topic again. Back then, as a newbie 1980s M.B.A.-Turned-Vegetarian-Environmentalist, I knew that the consumerism I promoted was part of the problem, and I've made lots of changes to voluntarily simplify my life. But I've been getting discouraged lately. State of the World certainly puts the problem back in focus for me. That consumerism is at the heart and soul of the problem was put into great big, bold letters.

The book compiles essays on the roles of cultural traditions, education, business, government, and media in helping us move from the over-consumptive status quo to lifestyles that are sustainable, given our finite supply of natural resources. I am intrigued by the last section where several social movements are reviewed. Such social movements will be necessary to inspire people and teach them how to shift gears. In a world with less oil and more severe weather and disease, we will need new to learn to value simple happiness that is not propped up by material possessions.

Transition Towns are a movement intended to help people see that less is more. Off to read their website!

Ireland's Karan Casey

Karan has been a favorite of mine since seeing her show at the Williamsburg Regional Library last year. Guess I'm one of those she calls a loyal folk follower.

One of the staffers at New Quarter is originally from Belfast. When I showed hime the CD I'd bought and told him how much I liked her music, he said something like, "Yea, the Irish like to sing those songs about the troubles and such." Joe's not much into folk music and prefers other Irish artists like the band U2.

Here's a YouTube video and an NPR interview. Enjoy!

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays ... Whatever

My Christmas Tree

This morning I received yet another e-mail from a friend that encouraged me to forward a “Merry Christmas” email to my email buddies. The purpose, according to this and the other viral messages, would be to tell others that I was celebrating the true meaning of Christmas as the birth of Jesus. The secondary and underlying purpose of the message I was asked to e-mail would be to save another American tradition from being lost to those who would be “politically correct.” Sigh.

Happy holidays, Merry Christmas, whatever. Let’s put a halt to this in-your-face “I’m celebrating the TRUE meaning of Christmas. Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah. My Merry Christmas is better that your heathen Happy Holidays” thing.

Look. I have no political agenda (as do the purported saviors of the Merry Christmas slogan who send the viral Merry Christmas e-mails to me?). I simply have broader views. Christmas is a religious holiday and a lot more. It is a worldwide phenomenon that incorporates a variety of cultural traditions today. It is powered by contrived and unsustainable commercial traditions.

The American tradition is one that has evolved from historic winter season and pagan winter solstice celebrations. In Northern Europe, Yule was the celebration of life and rebirth, when greenery was dragged inside as proof that life goes on. In ancient Rome, Saturn and Mythra, gods of agriculture and the sun, were celebrated. It was end-of-year celebrations such as these that set the stage for the modern Christmas.

When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century, leaders probably decided to absorb the ancient tradition into a new celebration that honored the birth of Christ, the feast day of the Nativity, since no one really knew when Jesus was born. But the rowdy and more pagan or secular end-of-year celebrations continued as part of the new Christmas tradition. It wasn’t until the 17th century that Puritans put the kibosh on the revelry.

In early America, the Puritans banned Christmas, but in the Southern colonies like Virginia, the celebration became more middle class and homebound. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Virginia, where there were no large cities and plantations were remote from one another, Christmas provided an occasion for families to gather. At that time, when the weather was cold and crops were in and there wasn’t much outdoor work to be done, they celebrated the end of another year and the birth of Christ while toasting the New Year ahead. It was low key.

In 1822, Clement Clark Moore wrote A Visit from Saint Nicolas, and that changed the celebration of Christmas forever. He created the modern American version of the Santa Clause myth. Forty-some years later, Thomas Nast provided new illustrations of Santa and surrounded him with additional traditions to fill out the mythology of the “jolly old elf.” In the 1920s, Santa was colorized in Coca-Cola advertisements. Macy’s is often credited with creating store Santas and Christmas Parade Santas as a marketing ploy to enhance the gift-giving tradition.

Here in Virginia at Colonial Williamsburg, della Robbia wreaths were fashioned by early program managers to entice more people to celebrate a “colonial” Christmas. Grand Illumination was created by Colonial Williamsburg to coop the tradition of a fireworks celebration on the King of England’s birth night into a celebration of the birth night of the King of Kings, thus encouraging more celebrants to visit.

Of course, Colonial Williamsburg wasn't alone. Christmas exploded in the last quarter of the 20th century as a retail event to boost the bottom line at the end of the year. By the 1980s, the term “Christmas creep” was being used to describe the U.S. retail phenomena of extending the celebration of Christmas to increase profits.

Some may see the Christian defense of the Merry Christmas slogan as a reaction to the changes in American life that threaten them and the status quo. Additionally, I see the defense of the Merry Christmas slogan as all wrapped up in the unsustainable celebration of Christmas with stuff, stuff, and more stuff. I worry that Christians who push this Merry Christmas statement-making thing are, to an extent and unknowingly, being used by business and those on the political right to stop people from questioning what this holiday experience really is all about. To question the American Christmas tradition is verboten!

So, while my friends worry about the loss of an American tradition, I worry about the unsustainable and politicized American tradition that Christmas has become. It’s time to challenge Christmas. Do the gifts and festivities make us any happier? Do we need things to stay they way they are in order to celebrate the Nativity? When we push the “American tradition of Christmas” are we being close-minded and unwelcoming to those around us who choose to -- or have to -- celebrate this end-of-year season differently?

I really don’t care too much about politics and positioning or formal expressions of religion, for that matter. What I do care about is that more people begin to search for deeper meaning and awareness during this holiday season. When we separate ourselves out as “better than you are” Merry Christmas celebrators, we are being parochial and short-circuiting the deep thinking we need to do about the heavily commercialized foundation of this American tradition.

Let’s question why. Let’s all acknowledge our oneness of ownership in this man-made holiday ... our oneness in ownership of all things. We are interconnected and our actions affect everything and everyone else. Merry Christmas, Happy Holiday, who cares. In the end, it doesn't really matter.

Open your mind. Celebrate Christmas and allow others to celebrate whatever. Or to not celebrate. Or to dial back on the festivities and gift-giving.

Peace on Earth. However you find it, may it be so.

Waterfront Property Online

Whew! I finally did it. Waterfront Property is now available as a blog.

Almost a year ago, I decided to put Waterfront Property online. I didn't want to re-self-publish and shopping for an agent is hard. It seemed such a waste for it not to be available, though. The revised form addresses the major criticism of the earlier book: that it was "too preachy." And I tweaked some characters and plot elements. I'll keep shopping this and other manuscripts from time to time, but in the meantime, here's Waterfront Property. People can read it and click on an ad to "pay" me if they like it. I can look at my Blogspot stats to see if and how many people are "buying" it.

Now, dear reader, a special request: if you're reading it and you see a typo or have a question, will you please let me know? Maybe I didn't catch all of the Marysville to Mathews transitions ... it's hard to revise a book I've read so many times.

This need for critique and editorial feedback is the reason why I will never self-publish a print version of Waterfront Property or any other book again. Take note, aspiring writers: you need help. Copy and content editorial review make a book better and more commercially successful. Don't self-publish!

Waterfront Property was my first book and I felt passionately about its message. The very first literary agent that I contacted wanted to read the manuscript! Instead of mailing it, my sister, my daughter, and I took it to her New York office and had a great girls weekend in the Big Apple. Unfortunately, the literary agent didn't like it enough.

I sent queries to about fifty other agents and got a few more readers, but no one wanted to represent it to publishers. My sister -- a librarian, who should be qualified to say that it's readable, even if she is my sister! -- encouraged me to self-publish, so I did. I sold about 500 copies.

But I got a little concerned when I received feedback that it was "too preachy." All of the real estate agents in Gloucester and Mathews hated me. Although it was the "Read it Mathews" book for 2005, the Mathews Public Library doesn't own a copy today. Hmm. Well, there were some problems, I admit. I canceled the contract years ago, but Amazon still seems to be recycling the original 500.

If I had found an agent who liked the sustainability message, maybe she could have helped me tone it down and make it more commercially viable. The book is a fictionalized version of my own environmental epiphany and it all takes place right here in Hampton Roads, as John Quarstein might say. The main character decides to stop over-consuming and start living more sustainably.

If we put aside the literary merits of the book for now and just consider the message, I think that the book was a little ahead of it's time. I started to think about my incomplete Waterfront Property blog while reading the 2010 State of the World and decided to get back to the unfinished blog, to get it up and running. I wonder if seven years will make the content sound less preachy and jarring? The movement to replace the environmental decline message with a sustainability message that is more personal has been an objective of many who understand the importance of increasing awareness of current environmental stress.

BTW, I thanked the author of Affluenza in the acknowledgments. His Google clipping service picked it up. In response, I received an e-mail from John de Graaf this morning, which was a great stroke. He is working on a new initiative, Susutainable Seattle, which I was happy to hear about and will consider more as I work with my Master Naturalists' sustainability book review group. He wrote a chapter of the 2010 State of the World about shortening work time.

I particularly liked the faqs on the Seattle site, "is sustainability just a new buzzword for the environmental movement," "what are the stakes if sustainability doesn't catch on," and "what can we do to make an impact." Good food for thought as we frame our local sustainability message. Should we adapt the Gross National Happiness index to the Historic Triangle or Greater Hampton Roads area, as Seattle and other cities have?

Hanging Out With My Choice to Live Sustainably

It was 34 degrees this morning at 9:30 a.m. as I suited up to hang out the clothes. Doubt nibbled around my edges once again, but I did it anyway. It's sometimes hard to live sustainably when most of those around you don't.

On a trip to New York City in 2002, my husband and I visited the United Nations. While there, we stopped in a gift shop and I bought my first Worldwatch Institute State of the World publication. It presented lots and lots of charts and data on global environmental problems, problems that I was just awakening to and reading about. I wanted to slit my wrists. The State of the World 2002 was one of several books I was reading during that period of my life. The reading convinced me that environmental systems were out of balance and that mankind should live more sustainably. Waterfront Property was my first book and it reflects my heartfelt concern.

While I received solicitations from the Worldwatch Institute to purchase subsequent annual reports, I didn't buy them. I always thought that the focus wasn't right, based on where I was in my journey toward sustainability or I was reading other related books. As a business person I was interested in Natural Capitalism, The Ecology of Commerce, Cradle to Cradle, Green to Gold, and others. As research for Waterfront Property, I was reading more about the Chesapeake Bay, the oceans, and ecology. I continue to read, learn, and talk to others about the state of the world and what it means. The awakening has permeated my life.

But when I received the annual message from the Worldwatch Institute this year, I bit on their offer. 2010 State of the World: Transforming Culture, From Consumerism to Sustainability was the followup I needed to reignite and continue the transformation of my values. While the 2002 report seemed frightening, knowledge has provided me with a sense of real hope and a flash of insight into the meaning of life.

This year's Worldwatch book is no less frightening than the 2002 volume. In fact, it is more frightening to those who are just getting familiar with environmental decline. (A friend who had just finished reading chapter one told me we thought she'd just go ahead and slit her wrists now.) We are at a tipping point. The science cannot be denied. Our choices between now and 2050 will impact what happens next and the ability of our species to survive the coming crises. That's why I suggested this book to my Master Naturalists Chapter. I believe that we need to include the sustainability message in all of the environmental education work that we do. But how to do it is the question.

Because many interpret the message as telling them to cut back and, in fact, make huge sacrifices. They close their ears and turn away. They don't want to think about it. Today, it seems normal to consume so many goods and services that to give them up would be hard. Growth is assumed. Our economy is built on consumption and without growth in purchasing our economy will crumble. In 1955, Victor Lebow explained that, "our enormously productive economy demands that we make consuption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption."

Sounds vulgar, doesn't it? But that's what we've done and what we continue to do: Shovel Coal on a Runaway Train. It's our runaway culture. It needs to be transformed. It's unsustainable to consume resources at current levels. This is obvious and getting more so every day, especially to those of us who are environmentally aware.

And so I do my bit. I've dialed back. I live simply. I have time to hang my clothes on the line to dry. It's becoming normal to me. And I think my neighbors notice. If it causes them to think about sustainable living, hallelujah.

When the fossil fuel levels decline precipitously, as they will by 2050, and when stressed ecosystems result in higher food prices, as they are, and as extreme weather challenges our government and infrastructure, as we are seeing more and more frequently, we who are currently living sustainably will be more able to adapt. Living without a dryer will be normal again, just like it was from Grandma, who raised chickens, smoked hams, and shelled butter beans. She lived a simpler life, into her late 80s, and was happy. I wager she was happier than my friends who commute an hour to work in their BMWs to make more money and live more unsustainably.

The new normal is just around the corner, so dial back and get comfortable.

Rare Winter Solstice in James City County, Virginia

The Moon at 9:30 p.m., Dec 21, 2010

Goeff Chester of the U.S. Naval Observatory is perhaps the most quoted man of the day. He inspected a list of eclipses going back 2000 years to find out how rare it is to have a total lunar eclipse fall on the same day as the northern hemisphere's winter solstice. "Since Year 1, I can only find one previous instance of an eclipse matching the same calendar date as the solstice, and that is 1638 December 21," says Chester ... over and over again on many websites. 

1638. The date made me look toward the Christmas-week night outside and think about this plot of land where I live. Less than 3 miles east of Jamestown, I imagined this spot in the headwaters of Mill Creek was darker and quieter tonight than it was 372 years ago. No Christmas lights or shushing traffic. The forest was still thick and lush. John Page had not arrived to settle Middle Plantation (now Williamsburg) and Richard Eggleston had not arrived to settle his Powhatan Plantation (now a resort near today's Mid-County Park). However, my closest neighbors, Richard and Elizabeth Kemp, were building a 35 by 20 foot house on their plantation, Rich Neck (today's Holly Hills subdivision). Other English were living on Archer's Hope (Colonial National Historical Park) and Joachim Andrus had settled Jockey's Neck (the Williamsburg Winery). Most settlers still lived on or very near Jamestown Island.

Farther away, Edward Hill I established his family business at Shirley Plantation in 1638. The family farm continues to operate today. Tobacco cultivation made Hill's risk worth taking. More than 700 tons had been exported to England by this time and slaves were being sold to Virginians. In December of 1638, Sir John Harvey was replaced as governor by Sir Francis Wyatt. Indians were a weakening threat, although 500 English would be killed in a 1644 uprising. (But Opechancanough was rounded up and shot at Jamestown. His followers soon faded into the west.) In 1638, Virginia was holding on by its fingernails.

Virginia was taken from the Virginia Company in 1624 and became a royal colony the next year, when Charles I became King of England. The colony had a population of less than 1,000 people then, about one-fifth of the total who had come to the colony since its founding. The Virginia colony struggled to hold on and Charles I was too preoccupied with troubles at home to attend to his foothold in Virginia. It would be a few more years until Sir William Berkeley became governor in 1642 and turned the tide with an influx of distressed Cavaliers, who came seeking refuge once the English Civil War broke out. 

December 21, 1638, a winter solstice night in the midst of the Little Ice Age. It was a bleak and lonely night in this part of James City County, Virginia.

How it ends or how it doesn't?

I know some people, all men, actually, who are entranced by physics. They just marvel at the purity of physical laws and are enraptured by the what-ifs of string theory. Unfortunately, I can't quite wrap my head around physics, especially when we're talking about numbers and concepts so far out there as the universe and alternate life forms. So, I skipped through the last few chapters of this book. However, I do believe it is worth your time. Everyone needs to read this sort of humbling stuff from time to time.

Chris Impey's How it ends: from you to the universe is truly absorbing and lightly written. I enjoyed the concepts presented in the chapters from that began at the beginning of life. Life is amazing, but on the level of human life, we know it ends. Or does it? Our body is just a bunch of borrowed atoms. And our bodies host zillions of microbes. Impey extends this about where "it" comes from and where "it" goes from the human level, to the planetary level, to the solar system, and beyond. Beyond the solar system I had trouble wrapping my head around it, but still ...

The take away message is that our lives are part of a continuum. We are just a smudge of atoms in some tiny and remote spot in the universe. We should get over ourselves and our "Save the Planet" talk because life will not be obliterated and to see ourselves as the center of it all is more than naive. Life lives and we are probably Martians. Read the book.

It's now one I would have picked up, but it was recommended to me by one of the guys at New Quarter and I always try to take a look at their recommendations. Our staff includes retirees who were a doctor, engineer, manufacturer, and head custodian. A former employee was a lapsed Jesuit priest. They are a bookish bunch and our conversations are wonderful. Today is the annual Christmas potluck lunch at the park and I'm off to it now. Here's our group picture from last year. Happy Holidays from New Quarter Park!

Making "Williamsburg" Christmas Decorations

On December 4 we had a great time at New Quarter Park making Christmas decorations with all sorts of greenery collected from our yards and wooded areas. I had Arlene Williams of Morrison's Flowers and Gifts lead our monthly program. About 30 people showed up to listen to her explain how to design decorations with natural materials. Afterward, she turned us lose to select greenery from the assortment that she and I brought to the park for the program. Everyone made a centerpiece or door swag to take home.

To make a door swag, I bought a rectangular cage filled with florist foam, stuck the key accent greenery in place in the foam, then filled in all around with many different kinds of greenery. Arlene's assistant made the bow for me, but I watched and repeated the process later. 

Because I've lived in eastern Virginia most of my life and because I've worked for Colonial Williamsburg in the past, I've always used a lot of simple greenery to decorate for Christmas. A little boxwood here, a little holly there. But I've never really been as inspired to do so much of the Williamsburg Christmas thing until this year. After making the big door swag, seen above and right, during the park program, I came home to clip more greenery and wire together decorations for the mail box and banister along the sidewalk and steps. I put more greenery inside in the windows with favorite ornaments and small photos. 

Making the more swags is much easier to do than I had thought. Simply clip and layer a variety of greenery. For the mailbox piece, I wired together magnolia, cedar, red-tip photinia, and boxwood from my yard. Two sprays were wired together, end to end, and I made a bow to cover the wiring and accent the center.

A former Colonial Williamsburg colleague, Mary Theobald, and current Williamsburg Farmers Market manager, Libbey Oliver, wrote a wonderful book about Williamsburg Christmas decorating tradition. Although the book is out of print, a lot of the information is online.

Mary researched the historical information. She tells what we do and don't know about colonial Christmas decorating traditions. The short of it is that Christmas was largely a religious holiday without all of the decorating, gift-giving, and over-blown festivity that we attach to it today. Yes, there were sprigs of holly in the windows and families gathered for meals and music. The Williamsburg Christmas tradition of boxwood and fruit covered wreaths that we know today was an invention of an early Colonial Williamsburg employee who was charged with attracting more people to the history museum during Christmas vacation time. The wreaths that are associated with a Williamsburg Christmas today were inspired by the work of 15th-century Italian sculptors of the della Robbia school.

Mail from My Roomie

Yesterday was a long day and I was pretty tired when I finally unlocked the door and let go of the bags, mail, and assortment of personal stuff I was carrying in from the cold. As I took off my coat, I saw that I had received a Christmas card from a lovely new friend. That brightened me up, so I pushed the bags aside and dealt with the mail first.

At the bottom of the stack was a large envelope from Virginia Intermont College and I almost tossed it in with the direct mail that would be deposited in the recycle bag directly. But my son just took the GRE and is looking into graduate schools, so I thought better of it. Virginia Intermont? Did they have a graduate program in Exercise Physiology? Did the small college in southwest Virginia even have graduate programs at all? Virginia Intermont? Did I remember it was a Baptist School? It tickled a memory from my Baptist youth when a portion of our home missions offerings went to several small Baptist colleges in Virginia.

But the big envelop wasn't addressed to my son. It was addressed to me. Well, had they learned that I was back in school pursuing a degree in Speech-Language Pathology? I knew they didn't have a graduate program in that field. Oh well, probably a solicitation or junk of some sort. I ripped it open while heading to the recycle bin with it and the junk mail. But then, I saw that huge, infectious, familiar smile.

Clo! My William and Mary roomie, Clo Phillips was on the cover. Dr. E. Clorissa Phillips, the new president of Virginia Intermont College. I quickly found a chair and read the article from beginning to end. My Clo. I'm so proud of her! She's an accomplished pianist? I didn't know that. A lot can happen in 33 years.

Clo and I were roommates at William and Mary during our junior and senior years. We had met as freshman pledges to Pi Beta Phi sorority and had a common friend, my boyfriend, who was from the small town of Dayton, which is just outside of Harrisonburg, where she grew up. My boyfriend and Clo were both interested in collegiate careers and have both gone on to fulfill their goals. The three of us would laugh and laugh. Oh what fun, what a warm and fuzzy memory of those happy college days.

But when I look back on it I think that it is quite a shame that I didn't get to know Clo better or keep in touch. It was college in the 70s, you know, and William and Mary was tough. Outside of class, I spent most of my time with my boyfriend and Clo had the room to herself a lot. I remember that she was bright and studious, nearly always at her desk when I came in, working hard. Often wearing those crazy can-sized rollers on top of her head. Always wanting to impress a certain, few, carefully-chosen boys. But what I remember most about Clo is that she had a great, great, great personality and was always fun to be with. I can't seem to recall her ever complaining or being rude. She was, and is, I assume, a fine person. I appreciate the fact that she was a part of my life perhaps more than she will ever know.

Pi Beta Phi House with Bray School behind

On the last day of classes during our senior year in college, I was in a car crash that sent me to the hospital for a month and a half. I was in and out, mostly out, so don't know exactly what Clo did or didn't do for me during that time. I heard that she stood in line for me at the music department and when it was my turn to perform a piece on the piano for the final, she stepped in to tell my teacher, as well as the judges, that I wouldn't be there. Funny. I took piano lessons, yet never knew that Clo played too. Was I not paying attention? Anyway, I guess my family leaned on her pretty heavily as they gathered up my possessions from our room in the Pi Phi house. We were from quite different backgrounds. I always wondered if something happened then that I don't know about, because Clo didn't befriend me after college.

People go their separate ways for any number of reasons, so who knows? The neuropsychologist that worked with me in 2004 told me that if they had know then what they know now about traumatic brain injury (TBI), I would have never been allowed to do the things that I did following the crash, like going to graduate school and moving to a strange city alone. If it wasn't something that happened in the initial weeks following the crash, I certainly might have said or done something wrong or stupid to alienate Clo in the early years following the accident. After I was diagnosed as having received a moderate traumatic brain injury (27 years after the fact!), I read the book illustrated here. The author was coping with mild TBI and did some pretty thoughtless things. I just shutter to imagine what I did in those first 5 years following my moderate TBI when I was pretty much alone in the world.

Well, this post isn't supposed to be about me. Yet my memories of Clo are all wrapped up in these bits and pieces of memory and a difficult period of my life. Excuse me.

So ... Congratulations, Clo! Your old roomie is so proud of you. You look beautiful and your family is gorgeous. I can close my eyes and imagine you confidently and surefootedly working with boards and legislators and all the powers that be in your world. With your strength of character, intellect and quick wit, you will surely be a remarkable college president. What a beautiful place "among the mountains" to live and thrive. All my best wishes for your continued success and the future of Virginia Intermont! Perhaps I should write this down on a card and send it to you. Yes, I'll do that.

Visualizing Information

A friend who is a visitor research consultant recently shared a video of a session from the TED conference with me. She fashions reports that tell museum staff what visitors think and want. So this session was great food for her thinking about how to present the information so that it will hit home. 

Yes, I agree. I'm excited about this video too, although not as much as I would have been when I was a young marketing communicator. It confirms what I've known for a long time about making information grab you. I come from that marketing place where we were continually coming up with pictures and memes that helped people understand the information without having to really spend a lot of time reading. GOT MILK? What's in your wallet? It's the real thing. Did you visualize a milk mustache, a barbarian, a bottle of Coke? As a marketing writer I learned to be spare and evocative. Every word had to count.

David McCandless is coming at the same message from his point of view as a journalist. H he cuts to the chase by presenting amazing data as design that will have impact. Like him, I absorbed a feeling for good design from exposure to good design. Unfortunately, it was often hard to convince the academics at Colonial Williamsburg and the National Center for State Counts to trim the fat. Paint word pictures ... because people are not going to get it by reading the words. Even the most intellectually curious are underwater when it comes to the abundance of information that we must deal daily. Readers appreciate knowing right away what it is they need to get from any presentation. If the consultant or marketer or journalist can design information that grabs the attention of the audience, the audience can take the next steps to reach, change, remember, care.

Enjoy!

Author Patricia Cornwell finds evidence from the past ... and gifts it to Colonial Williamsburg

Since writing Images of America: Mathews County I've become very involved in genealogy. Many of my ancestors can be traced to seventeenth-century Mathews County, Virginia, where I hit the proverbial genealogical brick wall. I assume that these ancestors were restless, like many in the period, and sought refuge and opportunity in the New World. 

Most of my Mathews forebearers were seafaring folk. It would make sense that in that age of government-sanctioned piracy that these entrepreneurial people were engaged in or familiar with acts of piracy of privateering. Mathews was a great, out of the way spot for those who sought privacy, I'm guessing. Most of Mathews is too thin for agriculture, but with many miles of waterfront property, it's perfect for people who make their living off the water for seafood and commerce. Some ancestors had kin in the Caribbean, New England, and Canada, and were engage in the triangular trade.

So, I was very interested to hear about author Patricia Cornwell's acquisition of two letters warning about the danger of Jamestown being a pirate base. She gifted the letters to the Jamestown arm of Colonial Williamsburg. According to the Colonial Williamsburg press release, “She asked me where the most logical place for them to reside would be,” said Bill Kelso, archaeologist. “I recommended the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library. I thought with the Foundation’s collaboration with Preservation Virginia that the letters would enhance the greater Jamestown-Colonial Williamsburg story.”

The press release goes on to explain their content: 

In each of the letters, the king of Spain wrote to the Alonso Perez du Guzman, the seventh Duke of Medina Sidonia, about his concern over the first permanent English settlement in North America. In the first letter dated July 29, 1608, the king said, “By various avenues He (i.e., the King) has been advised that the English are attempting to procure a foothold on the Island of Virginia, with the end [in mind] of sallying forth from there to commit piracy.”

In the second letter dated June 11, 1609, the king asked, “You will do me great service in continuing [to gather] intelligence about the designs of the corsairs and any [intelligence] that shows the English having interest in continuing to populate the land called Virginia in the Indies.”

“Philip III of Spain was concerned the English would create a base in Virginia to attack Spanish ships in the Atlantic,” said Doug Mayo, associate librarian of the Rockefeller Library. “He is afraid that the English are not only going to attack the Atlantic but raid as far as the Pacific and New Spain, or Mexico, as well.”

King Philip believed his fleets were threatened by the British, and on two occasions the Spanish set out for Virginia to garner intelligence about the English settlements. In June 1609, a group led by Capt. Francisco Fernández de Ecija left Florida for Virginia but ran into the Mary and John, a larger English ship commanded by Samuel Argall off Cape Henry. The English ship chased the smaller Spanish ship down the coast for several hours, and Ecija abandoned his reconnaissance and continued down the coast to Florida. In 1611, a ship left Portugal to investigate the settlements in Virginia. Three men landed near Point Comfort and were taken captive by the English. Marco Antonio died shortly after capture. Don Diego de Molina got a message smuggled out of the country to the king of Spain during his imprisonment. The letter encouraged the king “to stop the progress of a hydra in its infancy, because it is clear that its intention is to grown and encompass the destruction of all the West, as well by sea as by land and that great results will follow I do not doubt, because the advantages of this place make it very suitable for a gathering-place of all pirates of Europe, where they will be well received. For this nation has great thoughts of an alliance with them.”

In 1616, Molina and Francisco Lembri were shipped back to Europe. Lembri was discovered to be an Englishman and hanged for betraying his country on the ship. Molina survived the voyage and returned to Spain.

The Duke of Medina Sidonia was known as the commander of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The single-page letters were part of the Medina Sidonia’s family archives in Spain and auctioned off at Sotheby’s in New York.
  
The letters help us put the seventeenth-century Virginia story in context. It was a century of turmoil and intrigue that has been largely overlooked until now. I believe that the new association between Jamestown and Williamsburg will lead to further attempts to flesh out Virginia history in this exciting age when my known ancestors started over and made their way on this side of the Atlantic.  

Cold feeder watching weekend

The Alberta Express blew through eastern Virginia over the weekend and we had a dusting of snow Saturday night. I thought for sure that the cold snap would bring in the birds (see my earlier blog post on this), but no such luck. At one point on Sunday morning my feeder got a little busy, but it was just the usual suspects.

This morning I saw my first white-throated sparrow of the season under the feeder. Yea! But other than that, the birds I reported to Project FeederWatch this morning were:

Red-bellied Woodpecker	1
Downy Woodpecker	2
Blue Jay	1
Carolina Chickadee	2
Tufted Titmouse	3
Carolina Wren	2
White-throated Sparrow	1
Northern Cardinal	1
House Finch	2

I enjoyed watching a female red-bellied woodpecker fly back and forth between the safflower seed feeder (see her tail in the photo above?) and the woodpecker tree that we "planted" last spring. I wondered if she was stashing seeds in the holes she pecked? Or was she just alternating tasty bites of insect with the seeds? Birds always prefer insects. I believe that's what Doug Tallamy said in the Bringing Nature Home video that I watched last week at the Master Naturalists meeting.

Is This Global Warming or What?

Okay, okay. The sky is not falling . . . just this minute, anyway . . . but the dandelions did give me a start when I finally got outside today.

Tuesday is my usually laundry day and I had gotten everything washed in plenty of time to line dry during daylight hours. But I was busy with my Phonology and Language Disorders exam and time slipped by and besides, it looked bleak and blustery, it looked too cold outside. When I did rouse myself from the computer, I decided to take a walk. As I put on my warm and fuzzy Oregon Coast sweater on my way to the door, I glanced at the thermometer. I would need a coat too, I figured, and that's when I saw that IT WAS 66 DEGREES TODAY IN WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA! And I missed a great blustery day of line drying and wasted all that electricity drying clothes for HOURS and HOURS. UGH. Shame on me, shame on me.

So I started my walk. I pushed up my sleeves by the time I made it to the end of the block. Then, as I was looking down at all of the beautiful mahogany-colored oak leaves, there it was! OMG! A dandelion! It's November 30, 2010, and we've got dandelions. Little did I know that when I said Hints of Spring they would really materialize so soon. I went home again to get my camera to record the event. Gotta report this to Project Budburst. The walk was short . . . but I've got to get on with the exam.

BTW, the tomatoes that I left on the vines are still ripening. When I was at Mom and Dad's house in Gloucester on Saturday, Dad showed me that his daffodils were up. Mom said the crocuses had already bloomed. What will this mean come spring?

GTG.

Coyote at the Kitchen Door

We have a few coyote in the Williamsburg area. See the article I wrote last year for Suite.101 when I was doing a bit of research in order to write up something for New Quarter Park staff and visitors.The staff tells me there are two families of coyote in the park this year. And a friend who lives in a very nice new neighborhood in the city told me that her husband saw a coyote on their street fade into the woods beside College Creek.

So when I saw the recently published book Coyote at the Kitchen Door: Living with Wildlife in Suburbia by Stephen DeStefano, I snapped it up to learn more.

The book is very personal, really. The author writes in the first person and I certainly understand his emotion, as will most environmentally-literate readers. He sprinkles information and philosophy between the lines of everyday life and relationships. His knowledge of the environment causes him not to fit in well with those who live without that vocabulary, blissfully unaware, and although I'm not a biologists, I am empathetic.

He gets angry when he sees suburbia encroaching, trees falling. We are too many and it shouldn't be a big surprise that we see more and more wildlife as we build more and more housing developments where there once was forest. And now, the wildlife are getting pretty used to us. Canada Geese and White-tailed Deer are domesticated. Coyote and bears tolerate our presence and scavenge our yard, formerly their woods.

Toward the end of the book DeStefano spends a bit more time talking up the need for a paradigm shift. We need to change the way we look at the world and think about our relationship to other living things, an idea posited by other scientists and humanists as well. He talks about how much effort we put into the care and upkeep of our homes and reflects that, "I just wish we all could carry the passion and love and care that we show for the buildings in which we live to the land and air and water that surround and support them. I wish our nation as a whole had the same This Old House kind of enthusiasm for the natural environment that we have for the built environment. It is every bit as important to your immediate well-being as paying the mortgage and keeping water out of the basement. Without all the things the earth provides, the place in which you live will no longer be the sweet and comforting place you know as home. The real estate agents are wrong: your house is only your second biggest investment in your life. Your environment is your first."

The last chapter hearkens back to Aldo Leopold. As I read this I remembered reading A Sand County Almanac when I was writing Waterfront Property. The land ethic. Yes. It was my environmental epiphany. I used the same quote: "We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect." And in addition, "That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics."

Interspersed with the author's philosophical musings are short clips of fiction from the coyote's point of view that he weaves into the non-fictional setting: his Massachusetts neighborhood and region. DeStefano transitions, and the reader knows that the coyote is always nearby. 

One final thing: I like a passage he wrote about driving and thinking on an autumn day that I thought was artful, albeit melancholy. I've shared it here:

"I drive along, watching the weather and the rural scenery--letting my mind roam. Something about this time of year always sets me to thinking, especially when I am driving or hiking around. It's the dichotomy: it is chilly and kind of gray and gloomy, yet beautiful, quite and peaceful. It has the feel of the year's closing down, yet the world seems to open up. You can see far into the forest and the view of the sky is virtually unimpeded now that all the herbaceous growth is gone and the leaves are down . . . I drive, thinking about some of the same old things. I am  fully ensconced in my mid-fifties now and wondering how I got here so fast."

Reminds me of my last drive along the Colonial Parkway . . . where the coyote are always just out of sight.

It's Time to Make the Cranberry Sauce

When I was a junior in college, I traveled over to the Shenandoah Valley and spent Thanksgiving with my boyfriend's family in the Turkey Capital of the World. It was the turkey capital then, but I'm not sure it still holds the dubious honor. These days they say it's the "birthplace of the commercial turkey industry." But I digress.

I think about that trip and my former boyfriend's sweet mother every year about this time because Isabelle's cranberry sauce has become a tradition at my house. It was a big hit with my children when they were little. So tonight, as I wipe the sticky fruit juices from the counter and the Cuisinart, I salute Isabelle again, for something like the 30th year in a row. I'm happy to share this favorite recipe with you!

Isabelle Miller's Cranberry Sauce

2 cups sugar
1 lb. cranberries, ground
1 can crushed pineapple (with juice)
3 oranges, ground (part unpeeled and part peeled)
5 apples, ground (unpeeled)
3 - 3 oz. packages strawberry jello

I grind all of the fruit in the Cuisinart, although I think Isabelle used a blender, and then dump everything in a large bowl and mix well with a spatula. This recipe makes a gallon - enough to use half for Thanksgiving and the other half for Christmas!

Another recipe that made it home with me that year, way back in the 1970s,  was Isabelle's recipe for Japanese Fruit Pie. It hasn't been a regular with me, but my mom loves it and made it for the holidays for many years. I've always preferred fruit dishes, even over chocolate, so I suppose that's why I asked for the recipes in the first place.

Japanese Fruit Pie

1/2 cup butter, melted
1 cup sugar
2 eggs.
1/2 cup coconut
1/2 cup pecans
1 Tbsp. vinegar
1 tsp. vanilla
1/2 cup raisins
1 pie crust

Mix melted butter, sugar, and eggs with an electric mixer until creamy. Stir in coconut, pecans, vinegar, vanilla, and raisins and mix well. Pour into unbaked pie shell. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 to 35 minutes. 

Enjoy ... and have a happy Thanksgiving!

Taking Care of the Garden

I ran into a Master Naturalist friend at church this morning. She asked if I had been there last week. Unfortunately, I didn't go. The service and sermon had been all about nature, my friend said. She loved it.

Too bad for me, but at least I could go online to listen to the recording of the sermon, "Taking Care of the Garden."

Jennifer began with a quote from E.O. Wilson's book, The Creation, a book in which he appeals to fundamentalist ministers to think about the "stewardship of Earth" model and to consider how it has destabilized everything.

Human centered preaching with its emphasis on the afterlife has encouraged us to manage and control Earth's resources for our own benefit rather than to live as a part of a living Earth and recognize our oneness with it. The traditional Christian religious model, Wilson says, encourages apathy and denial. Why care about this temporal Earth?

We need a new model, he says, a new model to replace the God as King model with a God as Universe one. This way of looking at life does not elevate humans over Earth. Rather, it recognizes that we are part of God's body. The bounty of the Earth isn't there for our use. It is holy ground that requires us to nurture, protect, and deeply, deeply love it completely.

Jennifer ended her sermon by asking us to imagine the changes we would make if, indeed, we would to imagine nature as God's body. It would affect our life and every choice for living.

I think so. I think we would live more simply and we would tend our gardens with care.

Why do people think the way they do?

Haven't you stopped to shake your head from time to time and wonder why on Earth people think the way they do?

Well, let's turn that around. Maybe they don't think.

That is, maybe they don't think the way you do because they simply don't have the same vocabulary.

My stepson, knowing about my interest in speech and language development, suggested a recent Radiolab program about words and their ability to open up new worlds. It seems that people don't have the ability to think about certain things, say global climate change for example, until they have the vocabulary to do it. People can only think the way they do about words they know. Interesting.

Listen to New Words, New Worlds here:



"In the late 1970s, a new language was born. And Ann Senghas, Associate Professor of Psychology at Barnard, has spent the last 30 years helping to decode it. In 1978, 50 deaf children entered a newly formed school--a school in which the teachers (who didn't sign) taught in Spanish. No one knows exactly how it happened, but in the next few years--on school buses and in the playground--these kids invented a set of common words and grammar that opened up a whole new way of communicating, and even thinking."

Project FeederWatch!

I was delighted to start the 2010 Project FeederWatch season this week, but a little disappointed in my bird count. Numbers of individuals of any species were low as were the species count. Here are the numbers of individuals seen at one time of particular species in an hour in my backyard. I've heard that the birds aren't coming to feeders as much yet because there's enough "real" food. I hope that's the case and that things pick up!

Red-bellied Woodpecker	1
Downy Woodpecker	1
Carolina Chickadee	3
Tufted Titmouse	3
White-breasted Nuthatch	1
Carolina Wren	1
Northern Cardinal	2
House Finch	3
American Goldfinch	4

Don't Send Your Leaves to the Landfill!

It's that time of year again. Beautiful leaves are falling and my neighbors are bagging them up to send to the landfill. It makes me crazy. Leaves are nature's fertilizer! If you want a beautiful yard next year, just mulch 'em up and let them do their thing.

For the last few years, after I think that everyone's at work, I head out with by cart to bring big plastic bags full of leaves home to my yard (Bonus! If I don't rip the bag, my next garbage can liner is free!). Each year I get bolder. I've been known to stop at strangers' houses and load up my trunk with bags of lovely leaves abandoned by the curb, already decomposing into rich soil. Last year I actually went to two neighbor's houses and volunteered to rake their leave if I could drag them to my house.

This morning, though, I took a chance. I went out before 9 a.m. because I saw that my favorite leaves were on the curb and I know BFI comes early (Grrr. Another pet peeve. Read more at Take Your Own Trash to the Dump). I had to get these "leaves" because this neighbor mulches a lot and the bags are half full of mulch. Good stuff. I used the half mulch to finish off the low edge of one bed (above, right) and mulched around the fence line of my garden where I planted iris and daffodil bulbs. Subsequent bags from this neighbor's yard will be more leaf, less mulch, but the first rake of the season is always the best because the landscapers end up raking away the dry mulch on top of the beds.

Finally, I fill up my compost bins with leaves. Come fall, after being mixed with veggie scraps, coffee grounds, and rain, they will have decomposed into a nutritious blend perfect for mixing with native soil to give my plants the meal they need. Leaves do that, you know. Decompose. You'd think my yard would be ten feet high by now, but actually, those leaves have become a nice, thick layer of topsoil over what was a typical Williamsburg yard made of clay.

I've written two articles about composting leaves for Suite 101. To learn more about the benefits of leaving the leaves, take a look at Fall Landscape Maintenance: Use Leaves to Make Compost, Protect Wildlife and Fertilize Naturally with Leaf Mulch: Mow for Mulch, Use Leaf Litter to Improve Soil, Add to Compost.

What was she thinking?

I'm taking a course in speech science this semester and one of our discussion group topics last week was the use of EEG (Electroencephalography) to see if all is well with the way the brain is sending messages, especially those related to speech. So when I saw this photo in the Style section this morning, I had to skim the article. Seems that it's a "Daily Pic" from FotoWeek D.C. I've copied the article from the Washington Post below.

The review allowed me to flex my art history muscles. Pictures as patterns. Hues of Mondrian. Drips of Pollack. A connection was made between the composition and 17th-century Dutch portraits. Yes, I can see that. But I thought it was a little closer to 18th-century American than Vermeer, although this 18th-century Hans Holbein makes a pretty striking comparison.

I Googled up some portraits because once I got started . . . you know. How about comparing it to this John Singleton Copley? It looks like the sitter has on her thinking cap too. The limited, nearly monochromatic, palate as well as the stark realism drives you into the painting, into the mind of the subject.

Finally, as a student of 18th-century Virginia art and history, I couldn't resist offering a John Durand portrait for comparison. Are there electrodes hidden beneath that kerchief?

Here's the WP review.

Spark of humanity in FotoWeek fizzle

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 9, 2010

The latest of this week's Daily Pics from FotoWeek DC, Washington's third annual celebration of the photographic arts.

For a picture that's almost a symphony in white, there's a lot going on in Richard Ansett's "Woman With Wire Cap #1," which won him second place in the "Single Image -- Fine Art" category of the FotoWeek DC International Awards, now on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

One thing that's going on in Ansett's photo is its relationship to anything called "Symphony in White" -- from Whistler's first ideas about pictures-as-patterns in the 1870s to Barnett Newman's white-on-white abstractions from the '50s and '60s. That's modernism for you. And Ansett pushes back against it by adding pungent content: His all-white modernity isn't pure and pretty. It's about equipment and, maybe, science gone amok. Or maybe not.

A wall text tells us that Ansett's sitter is wired up to record her brain activity while she's exposed to pictures. Which means that she's rather like us, looking at this picture of her, and paying attention to our own brain states -- our thoughts; our feelings; our perceptions -- as we do so. For the time that this woman's being studied, modern science seems in the service of culture.

It even looks a bit like culture. The pure red, green and blue of Ansett's wires, on their white background, evoke the hues of Mondrian's abstractions. Their meanderings recall the drips and skeins of Pollock. The old woman's parchment face, in its white electrode cap, recalls elegant Dutch matrons in their white lace caps, in paintings by Rembrandt and his ilk.

For all its art-world froideur and its antiseptic, scientific gleam, Ansett's photo has that kind of sympathy, that kind of humanity.

Overall, the FotoWeek awards are a terrible disappointment. You've seen almost all their pictures many times before, in almost any publication you could name. The shot by Ansett, a commercial photographer from England, is one of the few that demands, and repays, closer looking.

As headquarters for FotoWeek DC, the Corcoran Gallery of Art will have free admission and extended hours through the end of the festival Nov. 13. It will be open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and until 9 p.m. Thursday. Call 202-639-1700 or visit www.corcoran.org and www.fotoweekdc.org.