Remembering the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

100 years ago today, tragedy struck New York City, a city that has known more than its share of tragedies.

And it struck the Jewish people, a people that has known more than its share of tragedies.

And the Italian community, and the vast community of workers who, in that heady era of early industrialization, were enslaved and endangered by the thirst and greed of unscrupulous bosses.

I know much too little about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire to comment more - but I, like so many, am both riveted to the story that is seared in our minds, and amazed at the hold this story has on our collective memory and imagination. Why it grips us so, is a question others are seeking to answer. But at the very least, it is a question that harbors hope.

Hope that causes us to celebrate the unnamed tasks and unsung workers who stitch-by-stitch, brick-by-brick, row-by-row feed and house and cloth us. Hope that calls us to check and re-balance our appetites for goodness and for wealth. Hope that reminds us that it is not just the well-being of the marketplace that determines the well-being of the people, but the well-being of the people - including in and at their places of work - that likewise determines the well-being of our marketplace.

Well-being does not flow in one direction. It is an iterative, reciprocal, mutually-dependent process.

So too the quest for environmental well-being demands the well-being of people, place and prosperity.

The triple-bottom-line is not a slogan or a mantra but rather a blueprint. It is the three-legged stool upon which society rests.

Remembering the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire is to remember this truth.

A production commemorating the fire created by Elizabeth Swados is being shown at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in NYC, two blocks from the site of the fire.

Tonight at the Shabbat dinner table, speak a bit about the fire, the memories of those lost, the lessons that have since been learned, the remedies that have been put in place, and the work that is yet to be done.

May the memory of this tragedy - and the innocent lives lost - continue to bring awakening and healing.

Wind and Sun

Grist - the green news blog with an attitude - reports that Germany’s solar energy complex now produces more power than Japan’s entire Fukushima complex.

Couple that with the news that Japan's wind turbines withstood the earthquake and tsunami without suffering any damage.

We may be witnessing a sea change in the world's outlook on how we can fire up the engines of human civilization without also destroying it.

It is time for the nay-sayers to give the wind and the sun a chance.

The Aftermath of a Storm

The protective structures I devised to shield my apple trees through the winter instead became their undoing. When the posts went down in the wind and snow, the netting took the tree trunks with them.

Five trees were leafy and alive in the fall. Five trees were lost to the storms come spring. My mother called to gently break the news. "The storm brought down a lot branches, all over. I'm afraid the apple trees didn't make it."

Home for a dash of hugs and housekeeping, I checked on my apple trees. It looked like utter devastation. Branches from our poplars and the noble beech lay strewn across the yard. The two large apple trees were parallel to the ground, trapped and flattened by the nets that were meant to save them. The smaller trees were entangled in their posts and netting.

I gently unwound the ties, cut loose the bindings, freed the branches. And was amazed.

While the deer have had their way with many of the buds, the trees have miraculously survived. Weakened and bent, perhaps forever lame, life is there. If I can manage to protect the trees from the sweet tooth of our four-legged vagrants over the next few months, the trees may just have a chance.

And we may have apples again come Rosh Hashanah. If not this year, perhaps the next.

If years and years from now, a grandchild clambers onto a thick, low-hanging branch heavy with fruit on an oddly shaped tree with a perfectly shaped nook for nestling and reading, I will remember this winter, how the wrong protection is no protection at all, how good intentions are sometimes badly turned, and how adversity can give us the most surprising gifts of all.

Perigee Moon

If the moon seems just a bit bigger these past few nights - and also a bit more beautiful - than it usually is, believe it. It is not your imagination.

We are in the rare phase of the 18+ years orbit of the moon when it is at its perigee - closest to the earth in its slightly elliptical orbit.

Which means, according to NASA, that the moon is indeed a full 14% larger in appearance in the sky and 30% brighter than what they call "lesser" moons.

So if ever there were a time to dance in the moonlight, this is the season, and this is the week.

Besides, the peepers are out in Baltimore!! Spring is definitely on its way. In fact, it is here. The spring equinox was last night, 7:21 PM EDT.

(For more information about the moon and its orbit and how it affects our tides, which always amazes me, check out aerospaceweb. It is one of the more readable sites on the subject.)

(Photo: NASA Image of the Day. Perigee Moon over Lincoln Memorial, Saturday, March 19, 2011)

Celebrating Purim

It is a glorious Purim Day, when we are bidden to imagine that all of our foes are - at least for the moment - vanquished, subdued by our own hands no less (with a little help from You-Know-Who), and we are free to celebrate our deliverance without looking over our shoulders, or posting sentries by the gates, or locking our doors.

I am a firm believer in casting about in the realm of the imagination. We all need to spend quality time there every now and then to make a good showing here.

So off with you, bon voyage, and have fun with family and friends.

To accompany you, perhaps, a bit of travel reading.

Here is a link to a review I wrote of Ilene Winn-Lederer's book, Between Heaven and Earth: an illuminated Torah commentary, published this week in Tikkun magazine.

Be sure to check out her drawings - they are perfect perusals for this Purim day.

Enjoy!

Knowing Home

In writing about "dwelling," the act of fully inhabiting the places called "home", Deborah Tall talks about feelings of alienation:

"When the landscapes in which we find ourselves are not diffused with our meanings, our history or community, it is not easy to attach ourselves to them."

Ignorance of the stories of place is not a benign miss, Tall is arguing, not just one more loss in a world of too many lost opportunities, but detrimental to the soul. For to feel alienated from place is to never quite feel at home.

I agree and want to push her thoughts one step further. To truly know a place, to feel at rest, to know that we are home, we need to know not only the human history of place; we also need to know the natural history of place.

Sadly though, most of us don't. We cannot name the trees around us, or where the owls roost at night; we cannot tell you when the moon will rise or where the sunbeams fall on our floor on the spring equinox. We do not know where our food comes from, where our trash goes, or what grew on this spot before our house was built here.

And so we presume not to care. We imagine that place is immaterial to the full exercise of our spirit, and burrow into our homes and coffee shops and restaurants and dens, watching electronic screens and each other, pretending it makes no difference where we are.

But of course, it does.

One of the most soaring bits of writing about the imprint of place on the human spirit is found in Mark Twain's autobiography, when he recalls his early years at the family farm.

"I can call back the solemn twilight," he writes, "and mystery of the deep woods, the earthy smells, the faint odors the wild flowers, the sheen of rain-washed foliage... I can call back the prairie, and its loneliness and peace, and a vast hawk hanging motionless in the sky... I can see the woods in their autumn dress, the oaks purple, the hickories washed with gold, the maples and the sumachs luminous with crimson fires... I know how the wild blackberries looked, and how they tasted; and the same with the pawpaws, the hazelnuts and the persimmons... I can feel the thumping rain, upon my head, of hickory nuts and walnuts when we were out in the frosty dawns to scramble for them with the pigs..."

He goes on like this for two pages, in 10 point font.

Reading these words we share his delight in this vicarious tour of his childhood places, and sense his ache for a time and place he cannot revisit, and we can never know.

While Twain's enchanted place of memory will always be foreign to us, we need not be bereft of or alienated from our own. What we might have missed in school, in childhood, in a region far away, we can gain in part now. So many places and people and resources are ready now to reconnect us to place.

We are particularly fortunate in Baltimore. Once again, the Natural History Society of Maryland's Community Naturalist Program is offering a rich program - Trees of Neighborhoods, Parks, and Schoolyards - that will help to reconnect us to place, to the natural and physical world we daily inhabit.

Among other goals, this program will offer you the opportunity to:

A. Become familiar with resources available to identify native and cultivated trees.
B. Develop tree identification skills through laboratory and field experiences.
C. Learn technical vocabulary of woody plant description.
D. Become familiar with characteristics of 40 common tree species.

It will also help ground us, root us, in that bit of earth's place that we call home.

Trees of Neighborhoods, Parks, and Schoolyards - Spring 2011 will meet Monday evenings beginning May 9. Come with a partner. Connect with your home, its land, trees and people.

And if you are beyond the Baltimore bounds, find a local nature center near your home to learn more, or if you are a maven [expert] naturalist yourself, gently share your learning and wisdom with your neighbors.

We should not have to live a world where we all know more about varieties of cell phones than the trees that inhabit and sustain our world.

Whose House

The human tragedy in Japan continues to unfold and we continue to search for the lessons that lie buried for us amid its ruins.

Among all the teachings that will rise from the rubble, one rings out: we can no longer pretend that we hold nature by the tail, that we have tamed her and wrestled her and can ride her as we please.

We can no longer imagine that nature is a discretionary element in our lives, that it lies docile by the door, waiting demurely, even servilely, til we let her in.

Nature will not wait quietly out there while we root around in her cellar, raid her pantry and toss back the refuse when we are done.

Nature remains a force all its own. The awesome might of nature wielded by God as drawn for us in the last chapters of Job still reigns.

For a while, during our heady, easy, energy-besotted 20th century, we thought we had tamed the beast. At least enough.

We acted as if we were the hosts and nature the guest. Sometimes we welcomed nature into our home and sometimes not; sometimes she was well-mannered and sometimes not.

But we are reminded with all that is happening, the storms and the rain, the flooding and the earthquakes, the droughts and blizzards, that nature is not out there, beyond our doors and the boundaries of our cities.

Nature is in here. Or no, not even that.

We have confused who is in whose house.

It is not nature who is in ours, but we who are in nature's.

We must mind the rules of our host, if we wish for things to go well.

While we will never rid the world of nature's ravages, at least we can know that we have anticipated them better, have not added to their frequency or ferocity, or been the cause of collateral tragedies.

Confetti in the Morning

It was Times Square in my apartment this morning. A small moment of grand celebration.

I got up early, and checked the weather on weather.com, as I often do.

But this time, in scrolling down the site, casting desperately about for a hint, a hope, of one more snowfall before the advent of spring, I saw the following:

"Minutes to sunrise: 45"

Who knew? Every morning, evidently, early risers get to participate in a virtual countdown to the dawn of a new day.

Not just when we are at the beach; or on vacation; or joining Dick Clark and a few million others once a year at midnight.

Every morning.

I checked the site again just to be sure.

Yup: "Minutes to sunrise: 43."

The clock was ticking, waiting, anticipating, counting the minutes til the moment of grandeur this earth has witnessed billions of times, yet can never take for granted.

Something to celebrate. Every morning. Right in our own homes.

How cool was this?

On Carrying

There is a deep intimacy that comes with the act of carrying. This thought came to me as I staggered home from campus the other day, a bulging book bag dangling heavily from my shoulders.

There is no hiding in the act of carrying, no concealing the weight, heft and volume of the object(s) being carried; no faking the strength, will and capacity needed by the one doing the carrying. No amount of girdles, vertical stripes, or other visual deception can alter the knowledge revealed through carrying.

To lift, hold, balance, cradle, and move an object yields an immediate body-to-body experience that other ways of transporting just do not possess.

To carry is to know; it demands that we respond and bend our energies and attention to the needs of the other. It is relational, cooperative. Successful carrying calls upon the two partners - the carrier and the carried - to work to fit together, to accommodate each other, wrap around, blend and meld into each other. This is of mutual benefit for to aid the other is to aid ourselves.

Perhaps that is why the Torah tells us God carried us as we entered into the sacred covenant - so that we could know each other in the most intimate of ways, and support each other in ways that precluded hiding or dissembling.

And perhaps that is why marriage is called nissuin, from the root n.s.a., to lift and carry, for marriage requires mutual shifting, adjusting, melding, each continually responding to the other. Nissuin is plural, reciprocal, for in marriage, it is first the one then the other who at times carries and at times is carried.

(Perhaps that is one reason, too, why we indulge in the otherwise anachronistic tradition of groom's carrying brides over thresholds.)

So too, more prosaically but no less pointedly, when we carry around the stuff and substance of our daily lives, when our physical possessions lay deep within our arms, or are splayed across our backs, hang upon our shoulders, when we cannot put them down until we get to our destination, we gain a greater intimacy of the earth, what we have taken from it, what we have done to it, and how we rely upon it.

I imagine that if we had to carry everything we bought, every piece we possessed, everything we threw away, we would gain a deeper intimacy and appreciation of the world's stuff, humanity's ingenuity, and what it will take to successfully carry each other across the years yet to come.

Wondering

"In Kangra, in the north-west of India," I read recently in my continuing search for the elusive concept of home, "where the Mitakshara system is in force, ancestral property is held in common by a man and his descendants as co-sharers. Any one of them can demand partition at any time.

"The Mitakshara system distinguishes, in fact, the self-acquired property over which a man has full rights of ownership from the ancestral one, over which heirs have rights from the moment of their conception.

"In other words, the members of the senior generation are trustees rather than absolute owners of the joint property. They have no right to sell or to give away the joint capital to the detriment of the other shareholders." (The 'Casser Maison' Ritual : Constructing the Self by Emptying the Home, Jean-Sébastien Marcoux Journal of Material Culture 2001 6: 213)

Now, let's imagine this: All natural resources are, by definition, ancestral property and thus joint capital. No one dares to claim that they made them, or self-acquired them (at least, not fairly). No one can claim exclusive rights to them, either for themselves or for a small, well-heeled cadre of stakeholders. No one can claim a greater share of the rights to and use of water, land, air, minerals. These are the commons.

And what if we pushed this just a bit farther? That not only are all those present today equal shareholders of the commons, but they are all nascent trustees for the next generation who will justly lay claim to the commons?

And what if we were to say that any degradation of joint capital (not just the sale or divestment of the commons but its ruin, pollution and the like) to the detriment of present and future shareholders were illegal?

And what if we did not actually make this a law but have this be something that was even more powerful than law, that is, a social taboo?

Such, it seems to me, is what the concept of nahalah, sacred inheritance, in the Torah is all about. That the land is inalienable, a possession in and of the commons because it is owned only by God. It may and should be used by us to provide us a life of bounty and goodness. We can temporarily divide it up for private use, but only with some stipulations.

We must leave part of the field and its harvest for all who are hungry.

We must leave the land fallow and, as it were, ownerless every seventh year. Everyone has an equal right that year to glean across the entire field, not as a dispensation against trespassing but as co-owners of this gift, this joint inheritance, from God.

We must relinquish and return the land to its original tribal stewards every 50 years, to restore equity, break any encroaching denial or circumvention of the commons, and live out the lessons of nahalah.

If we could live with that as our model, as an ideal even if not as a workable plan, what would the world, our economy, our farms, our cities, our closets, our appetites look like today?

Being and Possession

There I was, happily reading along, thinking that I had found a new best friend, a soul-mate with whom to explore the mysteries of home and the ways we live in and are shaped by this primary space of ours, when bam!, I slammed into a teaching that shocked me.

(Okay, so Peter King won't be my new best friend, but I do want to thank him for treading the same path as I am and clearing away much of the underbrush that would, no doubt, otherwise trip me up.)

In speaking about the necessity of calling home "mine" (albeit a "mine" that is often regularly and gracefully shared with others who also call it "mine"), and about how the ability to exclude others is a necessary attribute of home, King (in his book, In Dwelling) goes on to quote, approvingly, Roger Scruton on the nature of possessing:

“Ownership is the primary relations through which man and nature come together."

"Through property man imbues the world with will, and begins therein to discover himself as a social being… "

"[Through ownership] the object is lifted out of mere ‘thinghood’ and rendered up to humanity.”

These quotes come, appropriately, from Scruton's book called The Meaning of Conservatism (2001) and as much as they shocked me in the context of King, they also offer a keen insight into the challenges environmentalists face as we work to bring a more humble ideology of stewardship, tenancy, and usufruct back into western thought.

For Scruton, humans and nature (as if humans were not in their very being a part of nature!) come to into relationship only when humans reach across the divide to possess and impose their will upon nature. Scruton is using his school of philosophy to mend a breach between humans and nature that his school of philosophy created in the first place!

Spiritual environmentalists might counter Scruton's thinking with Psalm 24:1 as an anthem: "The earth is the LORD's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein."

In this view, humans and nature are part and parcel of God's creation, of nature. We enter relationship with each other through this mutual awareness, mutual status. We do not need to possess and subdue nature to enter into relationship.

And nature does not need us to lift it out of its indignity of "thinghood." In the narrative of creation, God made the world and at each step, before we humans ever came on the scene, the world was declared: good.

The first humans were given permission to use, indeed were charged with the task of using, the resources of the world to create home. But permission to use - which is an expression of relationship - is not the same as permission to own. Nor does 'use' necessarily mean to manipulate, change, handle or manhandle. I "use" the view of the tree outside my window although I never even touch it. I "use" you, my readers and audience, in this joyous semi-anonymous communication as my muses. Were it not for you, I would not be writing this, but I do not own you in any way. Nor, after writing these words, do I "own" them. Nor do you "own" the internet, though you most certainly use it.

Possession is not, then, the foundation of social being (although it is a prelude to enhancing or confounding it). Simply being in the presence of another, including nature, is.

And then the question becomes, now what ought I do?

Sunlight

The sun is out, bright, shiny and early today, after several days of snow, rain and cloudy skies.

It makes you notice.

Its brilliant debut this morning occurred a full 50 minutes later in the day than when we first arrived in Boston mid-January. Then, sunrise was at 7:10 and daylight was only 9 1/2 hours long.

Today, on the first of March, the harbinger of spring, the sun rose at 6:20 and will give us light for 11 hours and 13 minutes. It is seconds away from its longest daily leap forward of the year. (Today's daylight is 2 minutes and 49 seconds longer than yesterday's; the biggest growth spurt in daylight is, of course, around the equinox, when the sun is out for 2 minutes and 52 seconds more than the day before. And it does this for almost 16 days! Our spring days lengthen by 1/2 hour of daylight in only two weeks time. If this sounds confusing, go to this sunrise/sunset chart and plunk in your city name. It all becomes clear!)

For those of us whose energy and spirits are tethered to the rise and fall of the sun, this is the season we have been waiting for! We can take more walks, get more done, breathe more deeply as time itself seems to expand.

Funny how the sun seems to get younger and stronger as winter subsides. (I know, I know. The cause and affect are the other way 'round but go with me on this one, just for the moment.)

And if the sun can get younger, and stronger, and last a bit longer, at this time of year, maybe, just maybe, so can we!

It's worth a try. After all, Adar II, our double-dose of joy, is coming!

(Photo from NASA)