gathering

Blessing our food

It has become our routine.
At my house, as we sit down to eat a meal together, we join hands and say “blessings on our meal.” When the kids were younger, the blessing was longer and more elaborate, but it has shortened as they have grown into adolescence.
Blessings on our meal.
But those four words mean a lot to me.  Even in passing, even in this brief moment, it is a recognition of the food we eat, the men and women who grow it and the ways by which it reaches us.
Years ago, I was friends with a reporter who wrote for the newspaper I edited, who was an avid hunter. Each fall, he took his bow and arrows and went into the woods in search of deer. The hunt’s appeal to him was as much about the chance to commune with nature as it was about anything else, but he was also a good hunter, and he often returned with a deer, which he used to feed his family.
He used to say he considered it an honor to be able to hunt and he always offered thanks and blessings to nature for the gift of food.
I was fresh out of college and repulsed by the notion of hunting back then. But I readily acknowledge that his relationship with food was far more honest than mine.
He was all too aware that a sacrifice had been made to deliver him that food - something I, picking items from freezers and shelves at a grocery store, never thought much about back then.
I do think about it now.
It’s why it matters that the bin full of Honeycrisp apples at Outpost carries a photo of the Barthels in Mequon and that the maple syrup comes from a friend’s family in Northern Kettle Moraine and that some of the greens on sale come from Milwaukee’s northside Growing Power.
It’s why I worry about cheap foods grown far away and transported around the globe. I read an interesting and horrifying piece in the New York Times recently about the journey taken by frozen ground meat patties sold in large warehouse stores and some fast food restaurants. The various ingredients in a single patty might come from six or seven different suppliers both within and outside of the US. Try tracking that burger to its place of origin.
I think when we can picture the path the food has taken from the ground where it was grown and harvested to our kitchens, we can’t help but feel some gratitude to the men and women who have shared in its journey and to the world which provides us this sustenance.
And, maybe, it’ll inspire us to take a bit better care of those men and women and this precious planet.

New year's

I remember being much more humbled by the change of the year than I am now. I remember young adult years, when anxiety about New Year’s Eve plans began long before Christmas, and when the night itself was marked by resolutions and anticipation of a kiss at midnight. I remember noon shots of whiskey followed by frenzied dashes into frigid Lake Michigan. I recall the thoughts and feelings which weighed heavier on the last night of every passing year and then the hopes which rose so easily – so effortlessly – in the crisp air of each News’ Year Day.
Is it but age that tempers that excitement? I see how my children, now twelve and ten, approach that night, with wonder and awe, as if they will experience something magical at midnight, when one year folds into another.
It’s just another night, of course. The sun sets, Orion and his companion winter constellations swing across the ink black sky and then a light seeps like a weak stain, spreading across the eastern horizon.
Perhaps after so many years and so many nights, it is easy to take this momentous occasion for granted. Just another night. Just another morning.
But what magic!
What a gift it is, the bright stain creeping across the sky, the sun rising and the earth awakening again. It’s the stuff of mythology - of our deepest dreams and oldest tales: life overcoming death at its most simple.
Imagine our ancestors, before electricity. How they must have been heartened by the return of the sun and by the small lengthening of daylight each morning brought with it. Imagine primitive man before harnessing fire. How much relief they must have felt each morning.
In truth, there are some mornings now I awake with apprehension, stressed about chores before me, or worried about something that had felt so damned important during the dark of night.
Perhaps we need a News Years Eve and a New Year’s Day to sweep those worries and fears away, to remind us there is something much more elemental – and much more important – at work.
Whether you believe in a deity or not, you have to admit that the cosmological mechanics which bring about each new morning and place you and I together, where ever we may be, at dawn to witness the birth of a new day are quite near miraculous. Thank god, thank gravity, thank the big bang or whatever else you want. But stop for a moment and remind yourself: it is something for which to be grateful.
Happy new year.

Angels at sleep

It’s quiet and dark upstairs in the house. The soft whoosh of an air cleaner hums away in Austin’s room; the light blue face of the clock casts a pale glow in Hannah’s room. My children are asleep.
Hannah has already kicked off most of her covers. Austin has contorted himself into some corner of his bed. They are still now.
Hannah’s face is expressionless, a surprise, as I half expect her to always have a smile. Austin, too, appears calm and content.
For a parent, childhood is a treacherous and glorious occasion. There are the physical hurts from spills and accidents, from the rough and tumble games of the playground and from the missteps of trials and errors. And the there are the emotional pains, real and imaginary, self inflicted or from friends and family.
I watch them sleep and I almost think to myself, “I would keep them here, sheltered in this warm and sound place, safe from all the hurts of the world.” But I can’t, of course. They need to touch the sharp edges and the hot surfaces of life if they are to grow. They need to experience those hurts.
And, in truth, the home is no refuge, either. They live in two homes, the product of a divorce, already familiar with separation and loss.
I watch them sleep, walking the short hallway from her room to his and then back again, squinting in the dark to see them. They are resilient. Broken bones, scrapes, bruises and heartaches are no match for them. They emerge each morning stronger.
They have been hugging me a lot lately, and I have found myself wondering, as many parents would, if something was wrong, if they were facing challenges at school or dealing with some other emotional crisis I didn’t know about.
But standing here in the quiet it occurs to me: it’s not about them.
I lost a friend two months ago and now am also dealing with some other personal issues that surely have left their mark on me emotionally. I am certain the burden shows on my face – and that they notice it.
They are clingy, hanging on me, hugging me, whenever they can, because they sense I need it.
I do.
I watch them sleep. And I thank the universe for making me their father.

Comfort food

I am at a church hall, surrounded by food.
I have just attended the funeral of a good friend, and now have gathered with friends and family for fellowship – and food.
The tables in the hall are covered with plates of food. It is 9 p.m. and there was obviously a concerted decision to avoid main entrees and focus instead on desserts, as mounds of cookies, cakes, brownies and pies line the table. I suppose there could be some store-bought items among all of the sweets before me, but most appear home made and sit upon a dazzling variety of china.
Passing one group of mourners, I overhear someone telling her tablemates “ I think this is Aunt So-and-so’s red pie.”
And here, in this hall, as we sort out our grief and revel in happier memories, I am struck by the intimate presence food can have in our lives – that in kitchen after kitchen, ovens were turned on and bowls and mixers taken out soon after the news of our friend’s passing circulated. And this is just one day’s bounty. The past week has likely seen a steady stream of visitors to the home of the deceased’s family, many bearing both heavy hearts and Tupperware packed with lovingly-prepared meals.
We seem to intuitively understand that providing sustenance is perhaps the greatest gift we can give one another in times of crisis and need. And perhaps the emotional sustenance such deeds carry is just as filling, if not more so, than the nutritional support.
I am reminded of an email I received from another friend earlier in the week. She is planning a move across country in a few months and has asked her friends to each send her a recipe and the story behind it. In this way, she may carry her friends with her. No doubt, there will be days when one of those recipes will provide comfort and so much more as she goes about her new life far away.
Food obviously has a central role in each of our lives. We cease to exist without it. But we seem in many ways to have lost some of the richness of food’s emotional and spiritual context. At a fast food drive-through window this same harried week, the teen-aged clerk hands me a bag of food, accidentally drops my change on the road under my car and then quickly slams shut the window and turns away from me.
The food in the bag will – arguably – feed my family. But provide sustenance? Raise my spirit in dark times? Remind me of the people who grew it or prepared it?
I know, it’s modern times and all, and I’m sure that box of chicken nuggets may have appeared to be a much more efficient method of delivering nutrition than the old idea of a chicken in every yard, but I suspect we are, more and more, growing aware of what we have given up in the drive toward efficiency. We are, more and more, turning to farmers markets, roadside stands, co-ops – and each other.
And, in times of need, Aunt so-and-so’s red pie.
Pass another slice.

The hot is for real

The verdict is in on global warming. Just weeks after our president finally acknowledged climate change in his state of the union address, the world's leading scientists and researchers chimed in with their consensus that global warming was real, most likely caused by humans and going to get worse. OK, so it didn't really go down that way. George might be one of the very last to see the light (and feel the heat).
Link: BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Humans blamed for climate change.
Here's the site for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Link: link.

Healing energy

One afternoon this summer, my son hobbled in from the backyard with a look of concern on his face. He had fallen from his bike and suffered several wounds in the tumble. The most alarming was a puncture wound to the calf. Some part of the bike, some sharp protuding piece, had stabbed into the back of his leg. While there wasn’t a lot of blood, there was a bit of a mess.
Now, I’ve learned by now as a parent that it is always best to minimize these types of things. Any alarm a parent shows will be immediately seized upon by a child, and hysteria is sure to follow. No, best to play it low key. “Whoa, you have a wee cut there, buddy.” (It helped that it was on the back of his leg and he couldn’t really see it.)
We cleaned it, applied antiseptic and a bandage, sprayed Rescue Remedy on his wrists and rubbed arnica on his bumps. He was up to date on tetanus shots. By the following morning, Austin was ready to make the trip to a cottage up north, where we were going to vacation for several days.
But the puncture wound was smack dab in the middle of his calf, slicing across it nearly perpendicularly. Any stretching of his calf, any standing or stepping or running, pulled the sides of the wound further apart. And the lake, as pristine and northwoods-y as the water appeared… well, it was out of the question, not with an open wound like that.
We checked it several times daily, cleaning it, changing the dressing, debating whether or not a bandage was helping or slowing the healing and each time seeing grand disappointment creep across Austin’s face as I concluded that the lake was still off limits.
He healed. Sitting on the dock, his leg propped up and exposed to wind and sun, allowed a scab to form on the wound. By the end of the week he was in the water.
Perhaps it was just the healing process at work, the slow steady pace of the body’s own caretaking system, but it seemed to me that the healing really began once I let go of worrying about it. When I stopped my near-hourly fussing over the cut, accepted that he was well cared for and let it be, he healed.
As I reflect on it now, there may be a couple of lessons here. I can easily accept that worrying too much is counter-productive.
But, by downplaying injuries like this, was I perpetuating an old, misguided stereotype of men as stoic and unyielding to pain? If I had really listened to Austin at the time and sought out medical care, would he still have that tiny scar on his leg?

The journey

Travel feeds the soul. The adventure of experiencing someplace new and unfamiliar, of exploring new places and customs, and of meeting and befriending strangers, all energize us and help us grow as humans. Such is the promise of eco-travel.
We travel to discover, as Columbus did, as Lewis and Clark did, as countless other explorers and adventurers did. And while the sights, sounds, smells and tastes we encounter provide the gist of many stories we will tell long after the journey’s end, the bigger discoveries are internal ones, I think.
Really, any journey removes us from our habits and disrupts our routines and forces us to look at the world - and ourselves - in a new light.
I remember a trip across Europe, taken as a very young adult, when I spent the better part of the one day I had in Paris seeking not the Arc d’Triomphe, but the golden arches, so that I could eat food I could identify (and I could write another column about that irony, but my topic here is travel, not food, or what some may charitably call food, anyway). That trip taught me lttle about Paris.
I also recall a lightning weekend run to the Texas-Arkansas border, just for the heck of it, just to have lunch in Texas, before turning the car around and heading home (gas was cheap then). That journey, also undertaken as a very young adult, taught me little about Texas or the south.
But I did learn things about myself on those trips, and on other journeys I have since taken. I now seek out the unique and original in my travels, attempting as much as possible to experience authentic life in that place, to replace the blur from a speeding car window with a more detailed still life.
A friend told me once of a holiday he and his wife had taken in a resort city in Mexico. They had thoroughly enjoyed themselves until the day they rented a car and ventured away from the artificial splendor of the resort city and its shoreline of high rise hotels and found the real life and people which surrounded it: shacks and (by our standards) poverty. After those sights, they could no longer stretch out on recliners, watching the waves, sipping drinks with paper umbrellas. After that, they could not forget where the waiter, housekeeper or bartender lived and, more importantly, how they lived.
Eco-tourism aims to have as minimal an impact as possible on the place visited and on the globe as a whole. I’d extend that to include as a goal a respect for the places and people visited. Because even in our shrinking world, there is much to be discovered.

Getting warm

The call was unmistakable. The buzzy chirps and trills coming from the bushes along West State Street belonged to red-winged blackbirds. But this was early March, a rare warm day during which I had lowered my driver’s-side window as I headed to Outpost for some supplies.

My mind quickly jumped back several years to a sunny late-April afternoon when I had driven out to Mukwonago to hike in Vernon Marsh. Not many of the waterfowl that stop over during their migration had arrived yet, but the social red-winged blackbirds were just in, and the wetlands were alive with their raucous calls as they busily established territory, built nests and paired up.

Now, a bird’s early arrival one spring does not a trend make, nor is it in any way proof that the world is changing as a result of global warming. But pay close attention to the natural world and the evidence becomes pretty compelling – a string of anecdotal observations here and there strung together by scientific measurements.

Our front porch this winter stayed messy with birdseed spilled from the hanging feeder. In the past, round little dark-eyed juncos descended on the porch daily to pick at the bounty and keep the floor clean. I didn’t see any this winter. They never showed up.

Our seasons are in flux. Nothing is ever static in nature, of course, but studies point to a sudden and rapid change in our climate worldwide.

Researchers at the Stanford University Center for Environmental Science and Policy have documented spring’s steady advance. In our part of the country, it arrives between one and two weeks earlier than it did just three decades ago. Common grackles return to the UP some 46 days earlier now than they did just 26 years ago. But the grackels aren’t alone. More than 80 percent of the plant and animal species observed show signs of earlier spring – migrating or blooming weeks early. Those sudden shifts in a highly interconnected web of existence are cause for concern.

The idea of global climate change now seems inescapable. And the scientific community is in near unanimous agreement that human activity, primarily via greenhouse gas emissions, has contributed to an unnatural acceleration of this change. What is still up to debate is whether the growing momentum created by these changes has reached the tipping point, the point of no return. We can only hope not.

Keeping going

Persevere. Could it be that the secret to life is just that: to persevere? It’s not very deep, or mystical, after all. Just get up and go at it.
My son is on a basketball team this winter. It is his first taste of organized sport, a coached team of just six fifth graders who meet for practice twice weekly and then compete on Saturdays. They are very inexperienced but eager to learn and hungry for the camaraderie of the team – this age is all about expanding horizons and forging a feeling of belonging.
Each team they have faced has had more players and more players with better-developed skills at shooting and ball handling. They have forfeited two games for failing to put enough players on the floor and have been handily beaten in the other three. They have gone a half without scoring.
Yet, Austin looks forward to each practice and begins preparing for his games Friday afternoon, organizing his uniform and other equipment. He cannot wait to play. He and his teammates are a collection of concentrated energy and energized concentration on the side of the court before tip-off. Called into the game, each boy hurries onto the court, arms raised if on defense, eyes scanning the court, eager to participate. Persevering, happily, and growing.
In a small way, from watching him play these past several weeks, I have learned to complain less about things in my life. It is all about persevering.
My mother lost her husband, my father, nearly thirty years ago. She had followed him around the world and after he died, she moved back to her home in Ireland, uncertain of what to make of the remainder of her life and wondering aloud what sense it made to keep going without him.
But she did. She has grandchildren now and a lovely home and friends nearby. She has touched numerous lives and is a cherished part of many. No doubt she misses the love of her life, but she keeps on. The light of dawn steadily spreads into all of the dark corners of her morning and she rises to begin again.
Perhaps that sounds stark and terribly unromantic for an issue on love and romance, but it was after one of those mornings fifty or so years ago that she met her future husband.
And that is how it goes. You rise and step forward, towards each unknown day. And each step is a tiny victory.

New Year's Day

“Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.”

So wrote the late Hal Borland, an author who penned numerous books tracking the rhythm of the year and the cycle of the seasons in nature.
It’s a good thought. In the world of nature, there is nothing remarkable about New Year’s Day, and New Year’s Eve is just another night.
And so it is. The calendar will change, and many of us will mark that event with celebrations, feelings of sadness, fear or joy, fumble for a few days when writing the date, and embark on new journeys, many of which will no doubt lose their vigor within weeks.
But the night sky will look much the same on January 1st as it did on December 31st. The same juncos will scratch about on our porch under the bird feeder both days, though perhaps their numbers will be diminished – a hawk has been keeping an eye on the small birds visiting that feeder.
On the forest floor, rabbits, mice and squirrels will forage for food, unaware that a new year has begun or that an old one has ended, only that they are hungry and that the owls are, too. Nature has little time for nostalgia, dreams or expectations.
Of all the life on the planet, it is only people who will make resolutions, only people who will treat this one shift from day to night and then to day again as extraordinary.
We cheat ourselves, I think. Not that our plans or our memories are unimportant, for surely they are not. But doesn’t this focus on one day diminish all of the others?
I’ve made public resolutions and dreamt private dreams. I’ve jumped (OK, giddily skipped and hopped) into Lake Michigan on New Year’s in as raw and visceral a declaration of life’s power as I can imagine. I’ve counted down the seconds and I’ve laughed and kissed and I’ve cried at midnight. All of it has mattered.
But why just one night and one day of each year? Should not each day and each night be approached with that same sense of awe and reverence that we sense on New Year’s?
It’s nature’s message. Life is wondrous and mundane and magical and fleeting.
Treat it so – each day and each night.