my new hero

Today I was struggling with my solar powered sculpture project. It's coming together but there have been some technical areas I just didn't know how to make work. The art/techy types I emailed weren't responding...despair was beginning to set in. Finally, today I called, yes just got on the phone with, Therese who I had been referred to by Tony and she sent me to Guy. Guy is the guy I would be in an alternate universe. Look at his website. He has designed all kinds of amazing stuff. Created his own art and collaborated with other artists. He's built a solar hot water system. He lives in gorgeous Maine and to top it off he answered his phone and gave me several easy answers to problems I could not solve in my brain at 4 am! I heart Guy!

ecoversary

This week I celebrated 20 years of being married. In the midst of the busyness of school starting, daughter's bday, and myriad details of daily life my husband and I managed to get away for 24 hours! We had a light green theme to our celebration...On the actual day(Wed) we visited the temple of food and bowed down to local, organic, delicious, slow, tastes at Chez Panisse. It was the first time we'd ever eaten downstairs and the food was not surprisingly, amazing. The vibe felt warm and perfectly celebratory for 20 years, a number I find it hard to get my mind around...I guess I don't feel old enough to have been doing anything for 20 of my adult years but at the same time yes, of course, and glad to be doing what felt exactly right, eating that incredibly artful and honest food.

On Saturday we took the ferry to San Francisco with our bikes. Then ate more delicious local fare at the ferry building, Acme bread, local blue cheese, figs...then biked to our downtown hotel....we splashed out big time and had a view of the whole Golden Gate bay from our lovely room. In the afternoon we made our way to Crissy field along the water. It felt incredibly freeing not to have to worry about parking, all that stress of looking for it and paying for it, gone. We kept pace or even beat the traffic on our two wheels. Wandering around North Beach later we found Cafe Divine, another restaurant with local suppliers. The waiter, a younger version of my husband, gave us champagne and treated us with sincere kindness.

Sunday morning we went back to the ferry, ate more delicious local fare then onto the boat and with tenderness watched the city recede...pedaled home through the quiet Oakland streets to reunite with kids and all the stuff of life.

Parking Day movie

Here's a little movie I made of Parking Day.

Parking Day 2008

Happy Parking Day and happy 1st bday to my blog! Mary V. Marsh and I set out bright and early but ironically, got caught in traffic, on our way to parking day. Still we set up outside SFMOMA and made our park. Parking day regulars came by and drank sun tea, read Mary's earth flags, watched solar flora rotate, and fed our meter in exchange for little books. Newbies asked questions, we had a long intense conversation about climate change with a fellow from Denmark, writing his dissertation on visual imagery and climate change. All in all a day well spent.

madrone

I went to Oregon last weekend and visited the place I grew up. 40 years ago my parents "dropped out" and moved to the country, formed a commune and lived without electricity or running water. This was our 40 year reunion. Naturally seeing all the people was amazing but I'm not going to say much about that. What struck me was the place, the land, the smells, colors, sounds. All those feel stitched into my body at an almost cellular level. Each smell of flowering plants or pine was an olfactory reminder of my younger self. The soothing sound of creeks and streams heard everywhere on the land, the icy cold water on skin. The heat of the August sun. The greenish flaky serpentine rocks, deep purple blue oregon grapes, white queen anne's lace, orange red earth, red poison oak. Bird song, cedar tree, doug fir, madrone. Madrone bark peeling in layers, dropping down, red bark, brown bark, green. All of it soothing me back to my childhood summers and singing in the voice of the sweetest mother I have ever known.

sustainable school institute

This week I attended a Bay Are Teacher Dev. Collaborative institute on Sustainability. It was held at the Bay School (hence the photo). Two fun filled days of presentations, conversations, and delicious, organic food. The keynote speaker was Fritjof Capra,from the Center for Ecoliteracy . I took a class with him on Deep Ecology in the 80's at UC Berkeley. Hearing him speak I realized how much his teaching had inspired my thinking on sustainability and my general worldview. His view of life as a complex system in which each part's relationship to the whole must be valued was inspiring then and now. However it is difficult and sobering to realize how much more dire the situation looks now than it did 20+ years ago. Today I read that the Arctic is now predicted to be ice free in summer in 5 years rather than 60....Still it was so exciting to be in a room full of people, including a number of heads of schools, who want to use their institutions to create real change.

So much to fear so much to hope for.

I heart Freecycle

I recently got back into Freecycling as I cleared out stuff and I've got to say I loooove it. If you are unfamiliar with Freecycle Freecycle it is an email list where folks post what they have to give away and others respond. Let me enumerate what I love about freecycle. I can post my odds and ends, things that are cluttering and encumbering my life and others, often unseen, will gratefully relieve me of them. Things I've recently freecycled include a pile of old bricks, a car stereo whose volume went down every time I drove over a bump, and a shoe holder. On the other end of the equation I've gotten amazing stuff, most of which I would have no idea where to find. The ergonomic tray holding this keyboard on which I type is the example closest at hand. Oh and a real manual typewriter, which I will take to school to use with my students, but for now my 5 yo is learning letters on (my son came into the kitchen and typed one pithy line...the f word over and over and over, I heart twelve year old boys too). With freecycle there is the thrill of winning when someone picks me, yes me, for their item and the sweet relief of having something unloved by me loved and desired by so many. Truly green magic.

cool art

Wow, just found out about Virginia Fleck who makes mandalas from plastic bags and is part of the Austin Green Art. I need to be part of a group like that. OK, anyone know any other Bay Area artists who would be into it? I need a collective, collaborators, co-conspirators...

In other news I am making yogurt lids and cardboard tubes into art. Time consuming fun!

handlebars

Here's a video of my son and pals performing the Flobots song, Handlebars. It has a serious message about our times and yes, I'm biased, but I think he does a great job with it!

blue shadows

With all the smoke in the air lately the colors have changed. The light has a yellow/orange cast and the shadows look bluer than usual. It made me think of Monet's paintings of sunsets that were probably created by the coal and wood smoke hazing the cities back then....

today'snews

So in the hazy bay area air I read and heard some good green news recently. Elizabeth Kolbert's article in the New Yorker talks about a small island becoming energy independent. Her original series in the magazine a few years ago was a catalyst for my own environmental awakening. It was an incredibly bleak portrait of climate change that later became "field notes on a catastrophe", a book I own a signed copy of but have yet to work up the courage to read. In this piece she talks about how change actually happens. I like the vision of plucky farmers competing to see who can produce the most energy, also how the organizer worked with the existing tendencies of the community to create peer pressure to change. Social engineering against climate change! I'm going to be thinking about how to harness this when I go back to school in the Fall.

In a local parenting paper the editors looked at their carbon footprints but I can't find it online...

Today I heard on NPR that a garden is being planted in Civic Center, San Francisco. They are tearing up lawn and planting veggies! Very cool. Apparently an artist started this garden project. Another instance of the intersection of art and environmentalism.