Today I put in an order with Seed Savers Exchange. Three varieties of heirloom potatoes (two great keepers and one uber-rare variety called La Ratte that I've been looking for nearly three years).

Now I really need to dig up some of the field.

Also, three paste tomatoes. Can't wait until we have a normal stove again. Flat-tops are not my friend.

This last pre-storm squirrel run to the store depressed me somewhat. All the cans had BPA in them, of course. The other options looked unhealthy for other reasons.

Someday, I'll have a pantry with my own canned tomatoes and soups for when the power goes out and we get iced in.

Until then, it's packing the freezer time.

"I am suffering."

No.

"There is suffering."

"Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony."

~ Thomas Merton

(I say this after a night of sleep deprivation, a steroid shot, two days without toddler naps, 32 ounces of caffeine, and an evening of dodging every skunk in the county with my truck.)

"People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life."

~ Don DeLillo

Is that so strange?

What's so amazing about really deep thoughts? /Tori Amos

Happy birthday, Mom. I wish you could know that I'm sitting here googling old songs that you used to play in our living room while I danced on the wood floorboards and bugged you to play it again and again and again. Maybe it's some consolation that your granddaughter (who just turned two, by the way) is dancing with me to "Music Box Dancer". 

I miss you. I have so many things I wish I could say, and tell you how differently I see our time together now, but I'll leave it at "miss you" because that's the purest truth.



Meeeeeoooooow.

"We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing."

~ Charles Bukowski, "The Lifting of the Veil"

There is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain. I was in the car. And I was glad of it. Between one point on the map and another point on the map, there was the being alone in the car in the rain. They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people. That is a very comforting thought when you are in the car in the rain at night alone, for then you aren't you, and not being you or anything, you can really lie back and get some rest. It is a vacation from being you. There is only the flow of the motor under your foot spinning that frail thread of sound out of its metal gut like a spider, that filament, that nexus, which isn't really there, between the you which you have just left in one place and the you which you will be when you get to the other place.

~ Robert Penn Warren

Maybe that's why I love to drive.

 

If you'd like to know where my head has been for quite some time, read this. If you don't particularly care about my thoughts, you might want to read this anyway. This could be the most important thing the human species will face in the future.

The power of our food system is this. Up to 12 percent of our total fossil fuel use is linked to the food system. More than 35 percent of our total greenhouse gas emissions are linked to our food system. Our hope of controlling climate change or avoiding a world in which many, many people die from lack of food depends on creating a system that can withstand the coming shifts in climate, energy costs and availability and a worldwide depression. Without basic food security, we can expect radical political change -- people looking for scapegoats, governments overthrown, acts of war, violence. Without basic food security, we can expect to see a lost generation. People all over the world will be stunted developmentally, their children dead and their anger rising. They will be too weakened by hunger to have learned about citizenship or be able to address their crisis. As Gandhi said because they are too hungry, angry, and hopeless, they can see God only in the form of bread. Dinner is that important. ~ Sharon Astyk, Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Storage and Preservation

I love Astyk. She could go the way of those doom-and-gloomers, but she doesn't. She reminds us of tikkun olam. Remember when I wrote about that, years ago?

Tikkun olam. To repair the world.

You could do that by simply feeding people. Locally, sustainably. Not paying Mal-Wart to hire thousands of trucks to burn oil bringing in vegetables from across the country. Not wrapping everything in plastic. Not poisoning our ecosystem. Ensuring that the next generation has quality of life.

Astyk encourages us all to throw open our front doors and shout out: "All who are hungry may come inside and eat." And to not be afraid that there is not enough, or that there is anything to fear.