Winter Buds

A branch from my stately beech fell down the other day, a casualty of trimming being done to tame the wild offshoots of a neighboring tree. When I went to haul the branch away, I noticed buds, lots of them, all over.

Somehow, I had reached this stage of life believing that buds come out in spring.

But here I was, in the bitter cold, lugging away a 10' beech branch which looked ever so ready to burst into bloom. I turned to my apple trees, a half-lawn away, and my cherry trees which overhang my mailbox and discovered that, yup, they too were embroidered with buds all tightly hunched over, secure against the winter wind.

Huh. Why, I wondered, do trees put their buds out before winter, making them vulnerable to the harshness of winter and the hunger of foraging animals? Why use their flagging energy for this exhausting effort? After trying other ways through millions of years of evolution, what advantage do winter buds give them?

Seeking an answer, I did the only thing I could do: I called Charlie.

This is what he said: Trees actually put out two kinds of buds in the fall: branch buds and flower buds. This is why when spring comes, it can come very fast--because the hard work of assembling the materials for growth and the alchemy of mixing them together is done. The growth process becomes more one of elongation and expansion than creation anew. It's like going to a party, he explains, and finding a balloon to blow up versus going to party, then finding the ingredients to make the balloon, then making the balloon, then blowing up the balloon. Trees can respond to the right springtime growing conditions most efficiently and quickly if the buds are ready to go.

There is a welcome and comforting lesson in this as one gets older. (This time of year seems to shake loose the shadows of mortality and release the pensive musings that accompany them.) We who have been blessed with wonderful years of blooms and blossom, we who still dare to anticipate more seasons of growth, nonetheless can begin to think of that day when we expend our energies more for the sake of the next generation than for ourselves.

Winter buds are nature's version of the Honi tale about the old man who plants a carob tree. The tree takes 70 years to flower, and yet he plants it anyway in his waning years so that his grandchildren will find this gift of fruit ready and waiting when they arrive, just as he found the gift of fruit ready and waiting for him.

When his grandchildren join the party of life, all they will have to do is blow up the balloon. And as they get older, and their fall and winter approach, they too will set the buds for the next generation.

It is the perfect end-of-year lesson, something to carry us through all the falls and springs of our lives: the value of laying down seed for the dreams of tomorrow no matter how tired we may be; believing in the buds that lay dormant throughout a cold, harsh spell whose blossoms will emerge in the returning warmth, bringing with them a burst of blessings; the sense that in our last hurrah, we can give generations-to-come an invaluable headstart. Families, organizations, schools, projects, learning, civilization - all of them need nothing less.

If you would like to meet Charlie, learn more about Maryland's natural heritage, and discover programs and courses you may enjoy, check out the Natural History Society of Maryland.

Have a wonderful Shabbat, and a happy new year.

(Photo: beech buds)

Of Time and Dreams

I was talking to a new friend today who - while healthy and strong - is designing ways to close up his affairs so that things are tidy when he goes. Both he and I imagine he has many years left, but tidying up is the sort of thing you want to do when it still feels optional.

The problem, he confessed, is that in planning too much and tying things up too well, he was fearful that he would outlive his dreams. He had run a most successful business but retired from that 20 years ago. His most active days in non-profit organizations are behind him. He founded and runs a foundation, but he is "spending that down," determined to give all the money away, so that it too will end before he does.

He's always prided himself on being the sort that manages things well and responsibly. But now, with all his careful planning properly in play, he fears he may have more time than dreams. Then what?

Not that he doesn't have ideas - he has them aplenty. His mind and desire to help those in need and in pain are as sharp as ever. But how could he begin something he cannot finish?

It was then we spoke a bit about Moses. I had always thought it achingly unfair that Moses would suffer through the lonely pangs of leadership and not realize the fulfillment of his dream; that he would be called to carry the Jewish people 40 long years in the wilderness to the very threshold of the land of Israel yet not be able to enter it. Where is the fairness in that? How is it right that Moses, or we, die before the achievement of our life's ambitions?

But then, I imagined the opposite. What if we live past our life's last ambitions? What if we arrive at our destination and feel we are done? What then?

Which, in other words, is sadder: outliving our dreams or having our dreams outlive us?

The Torah, it seems, has chosen: we should always have dreams that excite us and drive us; we should always have dreams that we may never fulfill.

"It is not ours to complete the task," our rabbis similarly teach us, "but neither are we free to ignore it."

The Bekhor Shor, a biblical commentary, reinforces this by teaching that God's last act of kindness to Moses was taking him up to the mountaintop and giving him a preview of the destiny of his people, what they would encounter, what they would achieve in the years to come, all the way til the end of time.

Do not read "and God showed him the whole land... as far as the Yam Ha-aharon, the Mediterranean Sea, but rather the Yom Ha-aharon, the last of days."

My friend and I determined it was okay, indeed it was proper, for him to possess the vision, stoke the passion, and lead his people on a journey that he may never finish. Others can carry on after him.

If we are lucky, we will all be so blessed.

(Photo: Mt Nebo, the mountain perch from which Moses saw the Promised Land. From gandcborders.blogspot.com)

Tzimtzum

"In fitting the space around her, a woman does not necessarily fill it the way a solid plugs up a hole. Instead, what happens for her is apt to be a circular stretching, such that she touches all the edges without filling up the center, thus still allowing the interior its essential emptiness."

This quote is from a book called The Sacred and the Feminine: toward a theology of housework by Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi.

(Okay, I should probably pause here and explain that, no, the title is not a joke, though it comes perilously close to sounding like one. And no, Rabuzzi is not a friend - I don't even know her; and no, I am not cozying up to her so she will take my cat. I am reading her book as part of the research for my book on home that I am hoping to work on when Avram and I go on sabbatical in January. No doubt there will be much on home, and new discoveries of place written here over the next few months. And rest assured, there is no wood-burning stove in our temporary apartment. No woods, no scavenged logs, no sawing to write about. Lucky you.)

The quote precisely captures the differing, indeed gendered, senses of tzimtzum (personal contraction) I have mused about before.

Tzimtzum, of course, is the kabbalistic term for God's contraction, withdrawal, from the expanse of the universe to leave room for the creation of matter, the world and us.

Know, that before the emanations were emitted and the creatures were created, a supernal light was extended, filling the entire universe. There was no unoccupied place, that is, empty air or space; rather, all was filled by that extended light…. But then, the Infinite contracted Itself into a central point which is truly in the center of the light, and that light was contracted and withdrew to sides around the central point. Then an empty place remained with air and empty space. The Infinite then extended one straight line from the light, and in the empty space It emanated, created, formed, and made all of the worlds in their entireties (Etz Hayyim, Part 1, Chapter 1).

As I always understood it, the kabbalists imagined God retracting into one very small space, and leaving the whole expanse of the universe empty, ready to be filled with life. The supernal light then surrounded "the Infinite" like shrink-wrap, and shot out, re-entering and forming the world as we know it.

But that always felt a bit severe, lonely, and masculine. It seemed like God was not just retracting but retreating, moving away when moving aside would have been enough.

I thought about this as I imagined all the women who make room in their bodies for the children they bear, moving aside to create that "essential [life-giving] emptiness" that surrounds the child within. I thought about this when I imagined how we hold a newborn, not by pulling back and away but opening up and around, re-arranging our arms to create new, emptied, bounded space in which the child will be coddled, protected and loved; or how parents make room for their children on sofas and chairs, moving their arms and opening laps and creating space that is waiting to be entered.

Why, I thought, couldn't that be the way God contracted in the story?

This translation gives us an opening to read it that way. Perhaps the sides to which the supernal light "contracted and withdrew" were not those of the Infinite but the outer sides of the universe. Perhaps the Infinite was in the middle and the light occupied the surround, edging the universe, bounding the empty space into which life would now be poured.

Perhaps the classic but harsher emptying-out and moving-over vision of the world's creation can give way to this opening-up, enlarging self, embracing arms vision of the world's birth. It makes the world a softer place to be.

(Photo: Me, holding my granddaughter at her baby naming in October, 2010)

In the Beginning

"And God said, 'Let there be light.' And there was light."

The grandeur of the universe stupefies. Indeed, its very existence, its origins and dimensions, are baffling.

How could it have begun, morphing over the course of billions of years into something so grand while emerging from something so null? No stuff, no space, no time, no nothing. And then poof. Or bang. And voila. Shooting stars and tuna melts.

Or perhaps it has been there all along, existing for ever and all time, never a start, not knowing before?

Which makes more sense, a universe that stretches on forever and ever and ever and ever in space as it does in time, or one that starts (magic!) and then stops. Period. The End. Which is easier to grasp: absolute boundedness with nothing, nothing, on the other side (not even a side to consider "other"), or eternity, endlessness upon endlessness? How can we even wrap our minds around such concepts?

Add to that the fact that we are told the universe is mostly dark energy and dark matter; that it curves around on itself so finitude and infinity may eventually meet; that our senses and instruments limit the ways we know things so, like the characters in Flatland (a playful - if gender-biased - sociology of perception in the land of geometry), we can hardly imagine the worlds lying beyond us; and suddenly the next trip to the dentist seems oddly reassuring.

There is a blessing we are asked to say when we see lightning, shooting stars, a particularly spectacular sunset, and breathtaking vistas like the Grand Canyon: Blessed are you Adonai our God ruler of the Universe who continually (re)makes the work of creation... Oseh ma'asei bereishit.

I wonder what the rabbis of old would have said if they knew of miniature radios and microwave ovens, MRI machines, cell phones, fractal geometry and the stuff in the photographs from NASA's "Image of the Day". Our days would be spent in one long mantra of praise for the Creator.

Those of us who are easily distracted by the physics of a tube of toothpaste (never mind the crack of spaghetti) might want to consider adding oseh ma'asei bereishit to our daily morning fare, to cover all the miracles we encounter in the awe that accompanies us throughout the day.

(Photo: It was this photo that stimulated this entry. The Starburst Galaxy, Messier 82, where stars are being born. The galaxy is remarkable for its bright blue disk, webs of shredded clouds and fiery-looking plumes of glowing hydrogen blasting out of its central regions. From NASA's image of the day)

Passive Homes

We keep the public spaces of our house set at 62-65 degrees - which, despite one's initial expectations, is surprisingly comfortable. (Although my husband may differ with me here.)

So, on an ordinary winter day, the living areas of our house that face north are a cool but manageable (depending on whom you ask) 62-65 degrees.

My office, on the other, hand faces south, with a bank of windows reaching 12 feet high that lets the sun in all day long. We knew that without the foliage from the giant beech, poplar and hickory trees in front, the winter sun would beat in and heat my office somewhat.

What we did not know, til we removed the screens (to aid in watching the eclipse!) that the screens kept out so much light. And therefore so much heat. We decided not to replace the screens and see what happened.

This is what I can report. Here I sit, 2:00 p.m., sleeveless, in a room that is 78 degrees, heated passively by the light of the winter sun. As long as the sun is shining, my office is bright and toasty. Come evening, however, since there is almost nothing in my office that is designed to hold in the heat, the room cools down pretty quickly.

Which is why I was particularly interested to learn more about passive house technology.

Developed in Germany, modern passive building technology allows homes, congregations, offices to run with almost no reliance on fossil fuels for heating or cooling*. The siting, orientation, materials, airflow design and insulation all combine to create a healthy, comfortable and energy-lite building.

(* For all those keeping score, this statement does not take into account the fossil fuels needed to manufacture the materials or dig the holes or lay the foundation, etc. But the passive home folk DO account for that, that is, they conduct a comprehensive life-cycle analysis when planning your building so you can know from soup to nuts what your building's carbon footprint is.)

This is not new. Generations of builders worked with the sun and the earth to build homes that capitalized on the free resources of nature. With the heady advent of cheap energy and the seductive promises of early technology, the era of the man-made trumped the wisdom of nature.

Now, we are returning to those lessons of old, blending the most efficient ways of the natural world with the imagination of human ingenuity. There are exciting times ahead.

I wish I had known that when I was renovating my home.

(Photo: my office bathed in December sunlight)

Lunar Eclipse

It is 2:07 a.m. and something is definitely eating the moon. We can see the slow assault from our living room window, the moon riding high in the sky, methodically being devoured by some nocturnal creature.

Or perhaps we are witness to celestial pentimento, the gods' regret, the divine painting-over of the moon so it no longer beams itself down upon us, leaving only a delicate smudge stubbornly proclaiming its past glory. (The gods now wondering what to paint next.)

What must the benighted ancients have been thinking as they watched the heavens swallow up their moon?

3:00 a.m. The moon is a dim, red disk, reflecting the sunlight bending and streaming around the edges of the earth. As someone said, it is as if the moon is being bathed in all the earth's sunrises and all the sunsets all at once. This is pure grist, reflections of love or portents of destruction depending if you are poet or prophet.

3:30 a.m. The mood is totally different. We watch the moon struggle to be free from the overshadowing earth. It now looks like a birth, the pale disk pushing through a translucent, ruddy placenta to once again shine white and full-bodied on the face on the deep.

The eclipse is a slowly unfolding affair.

3:50 a.m. The white edges are reasserting themselves. Before it sets, the moon will fully recover, no worse for the wear, a celebration of persistence, healing and renewal.

Soothing lessons to carry off to bed.

The Lunar Eclipse tonight

The winter solstice and a lunar eclipse converge tonight in a midnight extravaganza.

(You can learn more about tonight's eclipse here.)

One of the wonders of lunar eclipses is the color of the moon. It turns coppery-red, reflecting the sunlight filtered through the earth's shadow. Because of recent volcanic eruptions, the color may be even deeper than usual this year.

The eclipse begins at 1:33 am Tuesday morning. Totality happens at 2:41 am and lasts 72 minutes. The eclipse ends (that is, the moon totally exits the earth's umbra, the conical core shadow) at 5:01 am.

So settle in for a sweet evening's nap, rise around midnight, make a thermos of your favorite cocoa or cider, or something harder if you wish, snuggle up with a loved one and spend some time gazing at one of the greatest shows above earth.

Old Things

I started reading a curiously entertaining book called Home: the story of everyone who ever lived in our house by Julie Myerson. I have paused at page 47, the mere beginning of the 451-page book.

The book deserves to be large because, like so many houses, it gives birth to more stories than its space can readily contain. The single-family house that is now the author's home is 150 years old and, for reasons yet to be revealed, has had an unusually large number of people living there.

In the pages of this book, the reader is treated to the rare, voyeuristic (and in this case, legal) pleasure of peeking both inside the days of a family as it goes about its private life and looking inside the bones of a house as it morphs and molds around its residents.

The surprising success of this book gives me hope that just maybe the 20^th century obsession with virgin buildings (an odd Victorian relic in an otherwise hedonistic world) is finally and blessedly giving way to an appreciation of the old. This, despite the fact that the marketplace continues to measure economic vitality by housing starts, even in this environment of bulging house foreclosures and an over-stocked housing market. I wish someone would explain that to me.

Perhaps the American 20^th century urge to dismantle or, worse, simply abandon the old and begin anew, to venerate the untouched as opposed to the well-used, to build where no one has ever built before, is abating.

Why, for example, should uncirculated coins be worth more than circulated ones? Why should something pristine and never-used, wrapped and boxed and locked away in a vault somewhere be more valuable than one that survives after having withstood exchanges, drops, moving, loving hands caressing it, flooding, fires, being tossed, lost or otherwise misplaced? Why is disturbing old-growth forests and undeveloped land with impermeable surfaces, strip malls and cul-de-sacs in non-walkable communities preferable to re-inhabiting, renovating and rebuilding neighborly neighborhoods? Gratefully, attitudes are changing and the tide is turning.

More and more municipalities are pursuing smart growth; young adults and retirees both are moving back to the city. Homeowners and developers are building with salvaged materials, re-using planking, tiles, bricks, stone. Sometimes we are even charging premiums prices for that privilege.

While historians will no doubt speak of the first decade of the 21^st century as one of ethnic and religious conflagration, and as a reckless, recurring, and astonishing betrayal of fiscal morality and abandonment of concern for public good by Wall Street, hopefully they will also see it as the struggle of individuals – millions of us - to reclaim a sense of the depth of time, the richness of history, the call of tomorrow and the realization that we are just a blip in the endless flow of time and place.

Our legacy, such as it is, will be carried downstream - as a blessing or curse for others. The choice is ours.

(Photo: The book does not provide us a satisfying picture of Julie's house. This photo is from the website forgotten-ny.com)

Watersheds

The Book of Genesis opens its saga of human settlement by describing the rivers that gave life to our first place:

A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. (The gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx are also there.) The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

Likewise, by law Jewish divorce documents, called gittin, must identify the town in which it they are written by naming its closest river or body of water.

I have been thinking that from now on, I, too, as best as I am able, am going to introduce myself not just as someone who lives in Pikesville or Baltimore County, but as someone who lives in the Jones Falls watershed inside the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

That will remind me - and hopefully others - that we all live not just in a city or town nested in a county which is nested in a state, but in a particular watershed nested inside a larger watershed nested inside an even larger watershed.

I know that today, if someone asks me to imagine a map of Baltimore County or of the town I live in, I think of man-made elements: local streets, landmark buildings, major highways and county lines (though, luckily, given our location, much of Baltimore County's boundaries are formed by our local watercourses).

But I am hoping my relationship to place differs, deepens, if I speak of myself as located not only within a legal, political entity but also within a construct crafted and defined by nature.

Of course it is not either/or. I live within nature and civilization. I am a child of both. But for all my life I have been preferencing the one and ignoring the other. What if I elevated them both to the same level? acknowledged them both equally, to myself and others? What if my watershed became as much a piece of my proclaimed identity as my little, unincorporated township?

Well, we will see.

Earthshine Two

Earthshine, the phenomenon of the earth's light reflecting back to us from the dark patch of the moon, is an overlooked treasure of a powerful symbol.

Some refer to it as "the old moon in the new moon's arms." This image is so tender, so raw and unadorned, that I ache when I think of it.

Who, I wonder, is this pair? A child cradling the frail body of an ailing mother? A nymph wrapped around a wise but wizened paramour? A small child riding on his father's back, arms draped around his father's shoulders?

But perhaps it is not about age at all. Perhaps it is a wife greeting her husband upon his long-awaited return? Mismatched lovers imagining they are shielded by the night? A toddler stumbling around with an overstuffed teddy bear? A 20-something carrying a well-used chair into her very first apartment?

No matter the image, it conjures up excruciating intimacy, the deep comfort that comes from touching, encircling, embracing or the excitement of life when it is over-sized and new.

It is good we can only see this earthshine every once in a while. I am not sure I could bear the intensity more often than that.

Earthshine

Thursday night my Google Gadget told me the moon was 19% full, in its waxing phase.

As is sometimes the case in these early and late lunar phases, I could see the barely visible presence of the full-bellied moon, the hint that there was more to this celestial being than the curved sliver that catches the eye.

This ghostly glow, I learned, is Earthshine, the "reflected earthlight visible on the moon's night side."

(Perhaps even more endearingly, it is also called "The Old Moon in the New Moon's Arms." But I will explore that image another time.)

It was a welcome vision at a tender time.

Sometimes almost all of us feel invisible, as if pieces of our talents, our gifts, our wisdom are overlooked. Squandered even. The world is noisy, fast, busy and crowded and becoming more so. Staking a claim takes more work than ever. Ideas, energy, egos abound. It is hard to know if others see us shine.

Even more, and sadder still, as bits of us seem invisible to others, they threaten to become invisible to us as well. We cease to see all the talents we possess, the contributions we offer, the differences we make in others' lives.

I think that is one reason why we like It's a Wonderful Life. This lovable, small-town stalwart loses his way and ceases to see the beauty and value of his life.

On those occasions when one's own light fails, when the shine is gone and doubt covers the face, light enough can come from another source. Not enough to fully light us up, but just enough to show us that we are still there, that the self and our talents have not disappeared.

That is why I like the moon in earthshine. It reminds us that though others may sometimes be unable to always recognize the good that dwells within us, and though we, in response, may succumb to their judgment of us, darkening and withdrawing parts of ourselves, there are others who believe, others who shine their gaze upon us, others who will light us up even when we feel dark.

It is through their goodness, their trust, that the full outlines of our being are once again lit up. It is they who give us the strength to return to our full brilliance. Because of their faith, our lights glow, the night sky shines again - and we are all the brighter for it.

Not Incrementalism

I am mostly an incrementalist. Which means that I believe that progress can often be gained step by step, brick by brick.

I can be happy with the success of “some” knowing that “all” is often elusive. I can be satisfied with “a little” knowing that “a lot” can be built by an accumulation of “littles”.

So, where others may strain and fuss against the restraints of incrementalism, I can thrive. Still, even I must admit that sometimes, incrementalism is not enough. In fact, sometimes it is wrong. Sometimes, you have to go all in.

As in so many things, I learned this lesson best from my wood. Or more precisely, from my wood-burning stove.

This is a big stove, something like 18” x 15” x 24”. Being cautious in the amount of fuel I consumed, I began by putting small amounts of wood in the stove. Paper enough to ignite the kindling; kindling enough to ignite the slender logs; and then one or two modest logs to warm the stove, the room and me.

For the longest time I wondered why the stove didn’t work well. Here was a workhorse built of cast-iron, a bulldog of a stove meant to handle a cavernous room. And there I was, sitting not 3 feet away and barely able to feel the heat.

Perhaps, my husband gently opined, you need to fill it up. Perhaps the stove needs to reach a certain peak of temperature before it starts pumping out the volume of heat it needs to conquer the space around it.

Not finding any good reason to refute this, I conceded that that might do the trick.

Whatever the physics, whatever the reason, it did. Half a stove is marginally better than none. But a full stove is ten times better than a half.

So it is in life sometimes. We cannot build a business, a non-profit, a movement with bits of our soul. We cannot move mountains if we start by opting for half. And we cannot compromise fairly if we start from a position of too little.

This is true in our private lives and it is true in national politics.

The challenge, as in so many aspects of our lives, is to know when to do what.

Mr. President, this looks like the time to go all in.

God's Language

We are the products of the world around us. Not just our bodies - fed by the nutrients of the soil and particles in the air, and absorbing the chemicals in the water, our bottles, packaging, pots and pans.

It is not just our bodies that are molded by the shape and texture of the world around us but our spirits as well. At first blush it seems a bit odd to imagine that matter can leave a fingerprint on the soul; that the material world can leave an impression on the spirit. But there it is, nonetheless.

The ecologian, Thomas Berry, wrote: "If we lived on the moon, our mind and emotions, our speech, our imagination, our sense of divine would all reflect the desolation of the lunar landscape."

(And while I strongly agree, I might also counter that if the moonscape were our spiritual landscape, perhaps we would find beauty in the subtle, sandy hues; the sharp textures of light; the brilliant blueness of the earth. And that, then, would shape us. So while Berry's point is valid, and is the jumping off point of this entry, the affect might be mistaken. The moon might not feel so desolate to a native as we think.)

Our spirit is fired up by the natural beauty around us. The grandest poems in the Bible speak of God being adorned with, served by and literally wrapped up in nature:

"The LORD wraps himself in light as with a garment; he stretches out the heavens like a tent and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters." Psalm 104

We encounter God through nature. God appeared to Moses in a bush; was present to the Israelites in a cloud; bore the Israelites to freedom on eagle's wings. God blesses us with abundant rain, fertile land and bountiful harvests.

The Bible is steeped in the laws of agriculture, how we must treat the land and what we must do with our harvest. Lessons of gratitude, the nature of ownership, the responsibilities to community, social justice all play out in the context of nature.

In short, the lingua franca spoken between God and the Jews is the language of nature.

But our ancestors were much more fluent in it than we are. That is reason enough for us to return to the soil; to know the qualities of different trees; to grow our vegetables and learn the names of our local farmers; to know the many ways snow falls.

We gain, thereby, a greater sense of place, belonging, connection and awe.

(Photo: a burning bush in my mother's garden)

Fires on Hanukkah

The fires burned, the world responded and then, the rains came.

At last word, the Carmel fire took the lives of 42 Israels and consumed 15,000 acres. It has also caused Israel to reassess its emergency preparedness of natural disasters.

International aid, including 13 firefighting planes and helicopters from the U.S., U.K., Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Turkey, France, Russia, Italy and Jordan, helped contain the fire. (Israel currently has no aerial fire-fighting capacity of its own.)

And on Monday morning, Israel time, the rains came.

It was just about that time, too, that the Jews in the diaspora began to add the prayer for "dew and rain," tal u'matar, in the daily Amidah.

Now, we all know that correlation does not equal causality. And I am not suggesting that the prayers of world-wide Jewry brought the rains and put out the fires. Indeed, it took the hard, generous and brave work of the international community to do that.

But still there is poetry in the gift of rain at this moment.

May the last nights of Hanukkah bring a new light, a healing light, an or hadash, to all Israel.

Isaiah and Enoughness

Isaiah astonishes.

Even after 2700 years, his language and message grab us.

(What writer today dares to imagine their works will be read and cherished 2700 years from now!)

Fresh from my meeting of the Sustainable Maryland Certified Social Equity Task Force (see 11/30 blog), I bumped into Isaiah 5:7-9. This is a famous chapter about the vineyard, and these verses in particular speak of social wrongs and excessive consumption, pressing them right up against one another.

"God hoped for justice (mishpat)," Isaiah writes, "but behold, injustice (mispah); equity (tzedakah) but behold iniquity (tza'akah). Woe for those who add house to house and join field to field til there is room for none but you to dwell in the land."

Now, as my children will be the first to remind me, correlation does not prove causality. And here, they might say, juxtaposition does not prove relation. But the rabbinic rules of reading biblical text are a bit different. Here, being next to a verse often means being related to a verse.

So, it is not inappropriate to argue that in placing these two verses back-to-back, Isaiah was linking land grab (more broadly defined as excessive acquisition) to a slide into social injustice. Or perhaps even more daring, he may be saying that land grab itself is a form of social injustice.

Of course, there is nothing wrong, indeed there is much right, in building houses and transforming fields to farms. These are good and necessary acts of a civilization. The questions are: to what extent? How shall we balance open space with farms, and buildings with open space? How shall the resources of the world be shared? How much is right for any one person own? What are the social consequences - for both the possessor and the community at large - of over-aggregated ownership and bloated consumption?

These are not new problems. They are part and parcel of the human condition. Drawing boundaries between necessary, rightful and generative possession on the one hand and too-much, diminishing and constricting possession on the other is hard. Isaiah reminds us of the treachery of seduction, that we can all-too-easily slip into doing wrong simply by doing too much of what seems right.

Once again, the ethic of sova, the joy of just-enough, seems to be an antidote to this social ill, knowing that it is only there that true satisfaction can be found.

Sustainable Maryland Certified

A new initiative designed to assist Maryland's 157 municipalities in their journeys toward sustainability has recently begun. Coordinated by the Environmental Finance Center at the University of Maryland and called Sustainable Maryland Certified, it is an effort to encourage the growth of livable, lively, thriving cities.

The idea is similar to LEED accreditation: offer a menu of sustainable actions that municipalities can choose from, with each action yielding a certain number of points. The goal is to reach a numerical threshold, reflecting a certain level (bronze or silver as of now) of sustainability.

What makes this program especially exciting is that along with the expected topics of natural resources, agriculture, economic development and the built environment, it includes points for health and social equity.

Seven task forces will be meeting over the course of the next 6-8 months to develop the overall criteria for certification. (I serve on the Social Equity task force.)

Our task, as I see it, is to embed in this program the value that the benefits and burdens of consuming the earth's resources should be equitably shared among all peoples, across space and time.

How this can be done is the daunting question. It will be instructive to hear the conversations around the creation of the program's criteria, interesting to see the final menu of options and fascinating to see how the ethics of environmental justice and social equity get woven into the fabric of our sustainability efforts.

Lessons from Thanksgiving Week

Tuesday A.M.: Went downstairs to feed the cat. Discovered pipe had sprung a leak. (Of course. Our family tradition is to have some household mechanical failure or appliance malfunction just before a holiday!) Called the plumber. Cleaned up flood in basement. Tossed damaged and moldy items, some from boxes not unpacked since we moved ten years ago. Found lost marriage license in old box of knickknacks. A bit moldy but it can be cleaned up.

Tuesday P.M.: Went shopping for ingredients to our traditional menu. Stores much more crowded than I anticipated. Some supplies running low. Stood next to customer on cell phone lamenting the empty space where plain cranberries used to be. Bought pomegranate-flavored cranberries instead. ( a welcome discovery!)

Wednesday A.M.: Cooked Tofurkey, the mainstay of our erev Thanksgiving (the night before Thanksgiving) ritual dinner. Five pounds of tofu flavored with marinade made from honey-barbecue sauce, soy sauce, molasses, and apricot marmalade. Tofu is mashed and shaped and left to season over-night in the refrigerator. Added a new secret ingredient this year: honey peanut butter. A most successful gamble.

It was the ninth annual gathering of our thirty long-forbearing friends and family. And as usual, come Wednesday about noon, it looks like the food will never be ready, there will never enough, and it will not be edible. Two hours later, it somehow all comes together.

Ateret was a big help. She - the family artist - puts the final touches on the Tofurkey. This year, for a variety of technical reasons, it was shaped like a tortoise. More Tofurtle than Tofurkey. A big hit. We hope to create a whole menagerie of shapes over the years.

Wednesday afternoon: All is in order. Nothing to do but wait for guests. Went to the gym for a swim.

Wednesday P.M.: Show time. Wood-burning stove putting out warmth of all sorts. Family and friends, ages 6 weeks to 80's, filling our home. What could be better?

Thursday: Relaxed with family, and had our traditional deli Thanksgiving dinner in front of the fire.

Friday: Avram prepared food for Shabbat; family rested throughout the day. I returned to my outdoors woodworking for the first time since last year. A fabulously, brisk, crisp, crackling fall day. Scavenged wood, easing my way back into hand-sawing.

I started with smallish sticks. Now, there is no use sawing wood that you can break by force. Better to save your sawing muscles for the larger stuff. So as I selected my wood for our weekend fires, here is what I learned: there is an art to guessing just how far along the limb you can go before you can no longer break it by hand, or by stomping on it with your foot, or by bending it like a wishbone, an end in each hand and foot pressing out and away in the middle.

It is not a matter of girth alone. It is a combination of size and dryness, density and brittleness. It is partly felt in the heft of the wood, in the feel of its give. And partly sensitivity and intuition.

As always, the wood teaches me. As parent, friend, spouse, colleague, teacher, speaker I wonder how far can I prod, guide, press, tease, appeal to and entreat the other? How far before my exertions backfire, causing the other to stiffen so that in place of bend, resistance sets in?

Discovering that line, being aware of that spot where the other's core matches yours, is an invaluable gift. It is at that place where true meeting, honest wrestling, self-awareness, and loving give-and-take happen.

America's Shabbes

Hurray for Thanksgiving, America's shabbes: time off, time out, stores close, commerce slows.

Family, friends, mounds of food. Weary cooks and grateful diners both happy that the meal's preparation is done.

The familiar menu unites the family and nation, bringing forth memories of Thanksgivings past.

Rituals like this have the power to collapse time and stack it up in a grand heap before us so we can dive in, slip across the bounds of years, mix them up, and feel the presence of here and there, now and then, people and places present and gone, all at once.

In this collage of seasons, we glimpse the many blessings we are fortunate to have.

Especially today, in the midst of global pain and distress, when need relentlessly calls us to respond, it is good to pause in our crusades and recharge and live the way we want the world to look.

For only then, when tomorrow comes, can we hope to make it happen.

Driving Leaves

The leaves were frantic today. Perhaps they were spooked by last night's storm or just pursuing their seasonal frenzy. Either way, they were in fine feather.

Dashing about in their clutches and clusters, they were blind to all else. Whole hoards of them were crossing lawns and stampeding over roads, oblivious to all but the run.

They seemed more like chattering, hyper-charged critters all in agreement about where they needed to go than dried up leaf litter simply defoliating the landscape.

Where, I wondered, did they think they were heading? What was pulling them so, driving them onwards?

Or perhaps they were not running toward anything but away from something, animated by fear and the desire to escape.

And it was in this confusion of movement that they reminded me of this nation and our frenzied populace. Those leaves seemed to be the animation of our spirit - so many of us rushing about, thinking we are motivated by a call to a greater vision of ourselves and our nation but really just moved by a desire to run from where we are now, heading who knows where, guided by no one more thoughtful or planful than the wind.

It is not, then, to the rush and the noise and the ones frantically vying to keep up with the rest that we should heed, but to the deliberate, the quieter, the thoughtful.

Then, perhaps, we just may be able to find our right way.

Re-enchantment of food

In America, we talk a lot about what we eat and how much we eat, how many calories and vitamins and fats we consume. We speak of food largely as a delivery system, an agglomeration of its different parts, about what we find when we pull it apart in a lab. Despite what we like to eat, we feel good or bad about what we actually eat depending on the value scientists have assigned to its constituent parts.

But food, like so many things in life, is so much more than the sum of its parts. In fact, if you really do pull it apart and deliver it in packets of pills and supplements, it is often less than the sum of its parts. The goodness of food, we are discovering, might only be found in the package as a whole.

The healthiest conversation about food might be less about what we eat than how we eat it.

In an interview about their work, “EATING: French, European, and American Attitudes Toward Food,” a study of 7,000 people in six countries, Claude Fischler and Estelle Masson note the following:

In France, Italy and Switzerland, [eating] mainly suggests shared pleasures, sociability, eating with family or friends. Eating means sitting at the table with others, taking one’s time and not doing other things at the same time... In the United States it is more a private, intimate, personal act that tends towards the almost impossible quest for an ideal diet that allows you to function better, stave off illness and live longer.

In the former countries, eating is a delight. In the later, it is a task. In the former, eating is measured in the experience of the moment. In the latter, in its outcome.

But even with food-as-task, we know that there is a gap between what people know they should do and what they actually do. "Nutrition education," the authors unsurprisingly remark, "seems to have failed across the board, especially in those social classes who are the most 'at risk'." Food as chore doesn't work.

Perhaps what we need is to reclaim the shared table and, in the words of the authors, "re-enchant" food.

"The problems of poor nutrition," they conclude, "apparently are associated with less rather than more social value attributed to eating" (italics added). In other words, the more we build shared rituals around our food, the more warm memories and stories we associate with eating, the more we intentionally eat together, the healthier we are likely to be.

"Rather than a personalized diet," they suggest, "... we would recommend cultivating the social practices of cooking and sharing a meal. Rather than training a population of diet experts, it would probably make more sense to have informed consumers, people sensitive to the qualities of a product, how it has been grown or produced and to a new food supply in which environment, health and pleasure would go hand in hand. In short, where food has become disenchanted, we should try to 're- enchant' it."

Of all the burdens we have in life, this seems like one we can enjoy. And of all the other gifts of Shabbat, re-enchanting the food of our lives is one of my all-time favorites.

This coming Thanksgiving may be a good time to start. It is the one American holiday when we all expect - or hope - to sit down to a home cooked meal.

And then, the next day, we can do it again for Shabbat.

Knowledge and Belief

In one of those moments of sweet serendipity, I bumped into the same spiritual message twice in the same week, from two mightily different sources. The one was in an ad promoting Malcolm Gladwell's upcoming appearance at the Meyerhoff sponsored by the Baltimore Downtown Partnership, and the other was on page 32 of Kenaf Renanim, the modern commentary by Hanokh Zundel Luria on the ancient book of Perek Shira, the song of nature.

Malcolm Gladwell, true to his pithiness, put it succinctly: “The key to good decision-making is not knowledge; it is understanding.”

Luria, true to his expansive style, put it in a paragraph. (I will summarize it for you.) Comparing Abraham and the Greek philosophers, Luria distinguishes between discovery that yields knowledge (speaking of the Hellenists) and discovery that yields belief (speaking of Abraham). The difference, he intimates, lies not in the body of facts but in the soul of the seeker.

Either way, we are reminded of an age-old conundrum that the purveyors of pedagogy struggle with to this day: knowing does not always lead to caring; facts do not always lead to action.

That is one reason why we may know one thing and do another. And why despite strong evidence, many Americans still question the reality of climate change and the need for reducing our energy consumption, converting to green energy, and otherwise tending well to the health of the earth.

Whole disciplines and centers of investigation now exist to help us bridge the gap between environmental knowledge and environmental behavior.

It all comes down to the human spirit. How do we awaken passions that lead to action? How do we "sell" people on sova, contented enoughness? How do we turn an economy-of-consumption into an economy-of-caring? How do we replace a focus on daily returns with a vision of a far horizon?

These are questions that Madison Avenue tends to know best. They are equipped to help open people's hearts and fashion public attitudes. We need to tap into their genius and get the word out. The problem: Who is going to pay for such a campaign?

Native or Not

I am worried about today's native plant frenzy. Nature centers and environmental groups organize outings among their devotees to rip up and pull out non-native plants and substitute them with "native" plants.

Two summers ago, our neighbors tore out a clutch of sweet honeysuckle that had been gracing that yard - and the air of summer evenings - since I was a child. Several naturalist folks I know have told me that honeysuckle is an "invasive" around here. Which means, it really ought to go. Though I am not sure that is the reason my neighbors ripped it out, or because it looks a bit messy.

But I do know that we seem to have this modern conceit that native always means best, and non-native always means invasive and destructive.

Indeed, some non-natives are dangerous and destructive, threatening to overtake and destroy whole ecosystems. And certainly they should be removed. But not all non-natives are bad. I once had a conversation with a landscape architect about how one even defines what plants are native and what are not; how long a plant must be established in an area and how integral a part of the sustainable ecosystem for it to be considered native?

The answer is not so clear. Nature is not static but constantly evolving. So whether it changes through spores that float through the air over thousands of miles or seeds that hitch a ride on a carcass floating in the water or in the clefts of wood pallets that come in freighters, local nature often finds itself serving as hosts to well-travelled nature. That is the way the world grows. Sometimes that is fine. Sometimes that is destructive.

In the first chapter of a book called, Nature and Ideology by Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, Stephen Jay Gould warns us against the hegemony of nativist thinking. Native, he argues bravely, does not always mean best.

Despite the popularly misunderstood lessons of evolution, he argues, "Organisms do not necessarily, or even generally, inhabit the geographic area best suited to their attributes... 'Natives' are only the plants that happened to arrive first and be able to flourish... while their capacity for flourishing only indicates a status as 'better than' others available, not as optimal or globally 'best suited'..."

And, I would argue, "first" itself is a relative term.

I write this not because I have any truck with some favored invasive, or non-native. (Although I do still lament the loss of that honeysuckle.) And certainly not because I am looking forward to the tussle I anticipate from dear friends who no doubt radically disagree with me.

I write to remind us that we constantly need to be on guard against any orthodoxy. Even orthodoxies in our attitudes toward nature.

Every decade, it seems, we discover, at some remove from its inception, that a once-celebrated, universally-adopted idea really harbored seeds of destruction (think DDT and thalidomide). This should warn us against our greatest yearnings to find the magic bullet; the grand solution. It should warn us against our tendency to declare Hallelujah at a new promise and embrace it as the latest orthodoxy.

Whether we are chasing the latest fad promoting Vitamin D or clear-cutting land to make room for suburbia, sprawling malls and cull-de-sacs, we may one day wake up and find the truth different than we had imagined.

Even as we reach for progress and improvement, we need to remember that today's new ideas that come to debunk older ideas may themselves fall out of favor - not because they are no longer fashionable but because they are indeed wrong.

Progress entails lots of promise, loads of failure and a few grand successes.

We should not be afraid to embrace and try new ideas, but neither should we too passionately elevate them to the level of orthodoxy.

Community Forestry Conference

I just returned from the Arbor Day Foundation's community forestry conference in Philadelphia.

On the whole, it was wonderful. Urban foresters, tree group advocates, dynamic volunteers, warm-hearted utility arborists all symbiotically co-habiting (not that way, this way: "occupying or sharing the same place, as different species") the urban landscape of Loew's Hotel on Market Street. animals", from dictionary.com)

Some of these folks have been in the field for 40 years, since its very inception. Others were fledglings like me. And the field is growing.

Cities like Philadelphia, New York, Nashville, Indianapolis and dozens more are transforming the "built environment," utilizing trees as the anchor for creating a "green infrastructure" that is more affordable, more secure, more flexible and more efficient than the contemporary "gray infrastructure". The efforts were grounded in trees but were not bound to trees. That is, trees were seen as the leading edge toward creative and sustainable initiatives of economic redevelopment, social equity, urban re-design and renaissance, and the sense of place.

I learned that 2011 is the United Nations International Year of the Forest. Organizations here in Baltimore are -hopefully - going to educate, celebrate and forestate (okay, I made that word up) throughout the year. At the very least, we each should get trees and plant them in our yards, at our congregations, in our neighborhoods.

If you live in the city, you can contact TreeBaltimore, or if you live in the county, the Growing Home Campaign.

They can give you more information, as well as discounts and coupons on trees.

I learned much and was mostly heartened by the people there and their often amazing ideas and efforts.

Yet here is the context in which I learned all this. We stayed in a lovely hotel, with lush linens, plush bathrobes, marble floors, plenty of food. We were three blocks away from City Hall, one block away from the famed Reading Terminal Market - think Lexington Market tripled or so.

Lots of people, lots of policy makers, groaning stalls over-flowing with foods of all kinds. And yet I could not walk from one end of a block to another without passing wheel-chaired amputees begging for money, self-appointed panhandlers raising money for a worthy cause (I present them to you at face-value), and plain old needy beggars.

Just inside so much food was being prepared, sold and consumed on sight that it was almost grotesque. (Vegetarians beware: there is more bare animal flesh laid out in what some people clearly think is a tantalizing manner than you ever want to see. And no manner of averting your eyes will save you.)

A bit Fellini-esque (I didn't make that word up). But outside was want, filth, passing eyes that never met, momentary blindness afflicting the hapless pedestrians for they could not bear to see the press of the need and requests these leading-edge beggars represented.

The contrast between want outside and fullness inside; them and us; seeking and blindness; forestry on a block where hardly a tree could be found, cast a shadow on the experience, and reminded us that all that we do with trees must also respond to this.

Another View of Eden

William Cronon is an environmental historian, a scholar who explores how civilizations use and think about nature.

Recently, I bumped into an article he wrote called "A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative."

In it he talks about the role that environmental narratives (the stories we tell ourselves about the world around us) play in shaping our behavior and our understanding of "natural" events.

What we learn is that there is nothing natural about the way we see and interact with nature. We do what we do because of the stories we tell ourselves.

In that light, I thought again about the stories of creation that we find in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, and how different they are.

Genesis 1 offers a vision of nature as abundance, a divine world-made-in-a-week, full of life carrying within it the promise and capacity for more life. It was only at the end of the sixth day, the last moment of creation, that humans were called into being. We entered, and discovered the world as a table set before us, ready upon our arrival, filled to overflowing with all sorts of delights and possibility, easily within our grasp. All we had to do was sit down and enjoy. That was indeed our task.

Not so with Genesis 2. Here, the picture is more complicated. At the opening scene, the world is barren and dry because "the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no human to work the ground."

So God created the rivers that irrigated the land, and made the human to bring life to the earth. Here, nature is not self-sufficient, as it is in Genesis 1. Here, nature is dependent on two things: water (a gift from God) and people (also a gift from God). Humans are, in this light, as essential to the earth's welfare as water. While we are also its beneficiaries, similar to the humans in chapter 1, we are most assuredly, and primarily, its caretakers. Indeed we are its tenders so that we may earn the right to be its beneficiaries.

We are, in a word, workers, bound to tend well to the needs of the earth so that it will tend to ours.

Interestingly, neither of these stories gives us an ending we can use. In the first, we are formed, brought to see the fullness of the world before us, blessed, and then, just as the living of life would begin, action stops. We have Shabbat. We are left to imagine how things spin out.

In the second, the end is unhappy. We can read it this way (which, admittedly fights with my feminist reading of the text, but then that is the beauty of midrash, it gently cradles multiple even contradictory meanings and gives us the right to hold them simultaneously): being seduced by the vision and promise spun by the snake, we experience desire, endless desire, which quickly leads to mistreatment of the earth. Our eating the apple represents our misuse the gifts of the earth, over-mining earth's resources, over-indulging our appetites, trespassing into terrain that leads to the collapse of earth's resources.

Hardship, exile, famine, loss result.

It is so very hard for us to imagine such visions when we are alive on a day like today, filled with sun's splendor, crisp fall air, stocked refrigerators, affordable foodstuffs in the grocery stores, full tanks in our cars. It is a far cry from here to the anguish of widespread need.

But Genesis 2 also teaches us that we can move from a sense of abundance and security to a world loss and need in a moment.

Graciously, the Torah teaches us both these stories, so there must be truth in both.

We need to learn how we successfully blend the two, blend a world in which the table is both set before us and waiting for us to set it; blend the world of privilege with a world of responsibility; blend the world of expansiveness with a world of boundaries.

That has clearly been our task from the birth of civilization. It is remains, as it has always been, a matter of life and death.

(from http://poetryandcheesecake.com/Images/the_garden.jpg)

Standard Time

Hurray hurray for standard time!

Now even us early-ish risers can once again wake up to the sun. At least for a few more weeks until the morning is once again swallowed up by nighttime's darkness.

But blissfully that is not now, and it won't last long.

If, however, you are affected by this seasonal dark, get those S.A.D. lights now. And don't forget the spiritual lift that exercise gives you.

My husband and I have begun to study together a commentary on Perek Shira ("The Book of Song"), a slender, ancient book which reads something like an anthology of spiritual lessons from the natural world. Each entry is a quote from a verse somewhere in Tanakh (the Bible).

The author, who is anonymous, clearly reveled in nature and needed a way to weave his love of nature and devotion to God together. Not since the psalmist, centuries before, had Judaism offered such a sweeping, authorized way to indulge in the attentiveness to and enjoyment of nature, and press that into a "kosher" way to seek and find God.

This book does. Yet, it is telegraphic, somewhat cryptic, and needs, in the jargon of the academy today, to be "unpacked."

Luckily, there is a commentary by Hanokh Zundel Luria that tries to do just that. Called Kenaf Renanim, it is as robust as the original is spare - over 500 pages of explanation and inspiration layered over the 84 one-line entries of the original.

You can dip in anywhere you like. Each of the sayings is self-contained, with the whole definitely greater than the sum of the parts.

We opted to start at the beginning.

Luria explains the first entry: "The heavens tell of the grandeur of God, and the sky proclaims God's handiwork." (Psalm 19:2)

Why does the book start here?

There are so many lessons that people need to learn; so many mysteries we yearn to uncover.

Sometimes, these lessons are particular and focused, like the values our parents try to teach us when we are young: modesty, thrift, diligence... We learn such particular lessons from particular elements of nature: modesty from the cat; caring (hesed) from the stork (hasidah); and so on.

But life's fundamental lessons, the pursuits of life's constant mysteries that are neither episodic nor situational but are present day in and day out, are taught through broader, enduring means.

As Luria says: Those all-enveloping elements of nature that are constantly in view constantly remind us of life's all-enveloping truths. Just as we are unable to overlook or ignore the heavens, so we are unable to overlook or ignore their teaching that God is all-enveloping and ever-present.

Even more, as heaven and earth sing their song of creation, they remind us of the Creator who gave them voice, and a reason, to sing. There can be no song and no singer without the composer.

A nice reason to hum our way through the day. Even and especially when the days are hard and dark.

(photo: solar flares from NASA)

Clean Energy Victory Bonds

The mid-term elections are over. The results are in: gridlock and stalemate for the next two years. Perhaps the best thing we can expect is politicians with great biceps from all the futile arm-wrestling they do.

Here's one suggestion for getting through the next two years: furlough Congress. With all the money we save, we could pay for retrofitting our homes with energy efficient insulation, high efficiency heaters and green appliances .

No need to pay our elected officials for what they aren't going to do anyway. Let them stay home, be with their families, garden a bit and bake home-made bread. Meanwhile, it will let us keep our money. That way, we will all take a much-needed national time-out and come back and try again in another two years.

Since that is not likely to happen, here is an even better, if chimerical, idea put forward by Green America: Clean Energy Victory Bonds.

Green America is a dynamic organization dedicated to "advancing social justice and environmental responsibility through economic action."

These folks know that money talks, money guides and money gets the attention of politicians, business-folk and plain-folk alike. That, at least, is something we can all agree on.

They are all about using that common interest to create a more just, equitable, cleaner, healthier world.

This past September, cleverly capitalizing on the pervasive patriotic trope in today's public discourse, they launched what just might be a fabulous idea: Clean Energy Victory Bonds.

This, they explain, is a way to "finance the next big wave of solar and wind -- without one penny of taxpayer dollars."

It would work like the Victory Bonds that helped finance World War II. If 85 million Americans bought bonds back then, when our population was but 132,122,000, leveraging $185 billion, think of what we could do today, of the jobs we would create, the energy - both human and electrical - we would generate, and of the healing we would bring.

And they are suggesting making the bonds available in denominations almost all of us could afford.

Not a bad idea to help us dream big during these hard times.

Studies on behavior change

For those of you interested in answering the question: "How do we get people to adopt more sustainable behavior?" here is a website that can help:

It is called: Fostering Sustainable Behavior.

For all of you working in synagogues, offices, schools, dorms, families and elsewhere, this could be most useful, as long as it does not overwhelm.

Just dip in anywhere - you will find quick resources that will excite some creative idea.

And if you have more time, download McKenzie-Mohr's on-line booklet that summarizes his work on community-based social marketing, which is about getting neighbors and friends to get neighbors and friends to do the right thing. Think: friends don't let friends drive drunk.

Here too: at some point we have to say: friends don't let friends trash the earth. We can all do better, and live better. Ten years from now, they will thank you.

What it takes to change

Fall's beauty has finally come to Baltimore. You can see it from the gently rolling fields of Reisterstown to the more earnestly pushing swells of Hereford.

These past two days I have passed such breath-taking splendor it has been hard to focus on the road before me. I have pulled off more than once to photograph the view (such as this one near the Pearlstone Conference and Retreat Center).

It is a guilt-ridden compensation for putting 100 additional miles a week on my car since I started working more formally for the environment. Clearly, there are some things that personal commitment alone cannot solve. Which is why we must work for systemic change. Individual behavioral alone cannot create mass transit systems or a fleet of clean cars.

Still and all, personal behavior does play a role. And it is around personal behavior and its accompanying attitude that my husband and I had a telling exchange this week. I announced that I was going out one morning with my planned bundle of errands all grouped to minimize my "vehicle-miles traveled". When I got to my last stop - the gym where I swim - I realized that I had left my gym bag at home, and unless I wanted to wander around the rest of the day inappropriately and uncomfortably dressed, I had to go home, get the bag and return to the pool.

Upon reaching home, I explained to my surprised husband that I had forgotten my bag and how unfortunate it was that I had to come back home and waste so much ...

Here is where it got interesting. He finished the sentence with the word "time." I finished the sentence with the words "CO2 emissions." (Okay, technically, it is probably correct to say "many emissions" rather than "much emissions" but that is arguable and, besides, it is not the point!!)

And I realized at that moment how deeply we must feel the ache of what we are doing before we will be motivated to change the ways we live. And how deeply the lessons and values of my work have burrowed themselves into me.

Until and unless we regard the unnecessary expenditure of greenhouse gas emissions the same way we regard the unnecessary expenditure of time, or money, why will we be motivated to change our behavior?

But the question is, how do we change how we think, and even more, how we feel?

The Atlantic Flyway

We live at a crossroads, quite literally. At least those of us who dwell in the region of the Chesapeake Bay.

Twice a year, we find ourselves converged upon, to the delight of many and the distress of some, when millions of migratory birds pass through our narrow corridor bound for their seasonal homes.

The darkest area on the map above, the place where several sub-flyways converge, is right here over Maryland and the hospitable waters of the Chesapeake Bay.

Birds that visit us from the north might spend half the year as far away as Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina.

They come here because the Bay and its surrounding lands are so welcoming. According to chesapeakebay.net, "The shoreline of the Chesapeake Bay and its tidal tributaries including all tidal wetlands and islands, is over 11,600 miles. That's more shoreline than the entire west coast of the United States."

Couple that extraordinary feature with the fact that much of the Bay is less than 6 feet deep (it is a flooded lowland, really, surrounding a deep water channel at its center), bounded by wetlands, woodlands and farms and you have a veritable aviary Garden of Eden.

(By the way, in seeking a good map to show you the ancient deepwater channel running down the center of today's bay, I found an irresistible phrase: relict thalwegs. Used in fluvial geomorphology - a fun phrase itself! - relict refers to a remnant, a surviving portion; and a thalweg, meaning 'valley way,' signifies the deepest part of a watercourse. Really, the whole blog was worth writing just to discover that.)

Now, of course, is the time when the flyway is most active.

Interestingly, Israel, likewise, occupies a similar coastal geographical niche in the Middle East. According to Kibbutz Lotan's Center for Creative Ecology, "Half a billion migrating birds, more than 230 species, fly in Israeli air space on annual migrations between Europe, western Asia and Africa."

The prophet Jeremiah noted the seasonal migrations in biblical times: “The stork in the heaven knows her appointed times; and the turtledove, swift and the crane observe their time of coming.” (Jeremiah 8:7).

The trees and we have our seasonal garb; the sun its gyrating arc; the wind its variable moods. The birds, not to be outdone, outdo us all. Wish them godspeed as they go by.

(map from US Fish and Wildlife Service)