Monday, March 30, 2009

A challenge of a lifetime

News that the land on which the Leisure Time Spring Water has been leased to Chesapeake Gas Drilling Company and that the Canadian company, Boreal Water, to which the waterworks has been sold has no real concerns about the development, has me chuckling in a sinister sort of way. It’s an activity that I really should consider to be a dubious at best and probably not something to indulge in any sort of an active way.

I come to this criticism of my sinister glee by way of Buddhist teacher Sharon Lovich, who teaches at the Kadampa Buddhist Center in Glen Spey and who was the speaker at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship this past Sunday. Whenever she explains the Buddhist practice, in this case of giving and receiving, I am always reminded of my highest aspiration. Specific to this news and paraphrasing at best, it is never a good idea for your own karma or for peace in the world to sneer at people who are oblivious to the losses that they haven’t discovered yet.

It’s an ironic position for a sustainable someone like me to take, this being compassionate for corporations that have no clue of their losses, because the bottling of water, from springs in Livingston Manor as well as everywhere else in the world, into little plastic bottles is about as wasteful, and unsustainable an activity that can be imagined in this post-modern race to oblivion. Still, in my Unitarian Univeralist interpretation of Buddhist practice and ethical principles throughout the ages, it’s probably never a good idea to be smug about what you know to be true. That attitude, as well as other cynical activities, is just the kind of thing that will bite you in the butt when you realize that you probably participate in perpetuating the system yourself.

Like I was never thirsty and never bought a bottle of water? Like it doesn’t drive a stake through my heart to understand that Chesapeake now has access to a pristine artesian well that has the capacity to provide millions of customers with millions of liters of spring water? Like it doesn’t really matter to the economy of Sullivan County that a company, Leisure Time Spring Water, is going bankrupt and has sold its asset of access to spring water to a Canadian company, even if a gas drilling company will vie for the precious resource?

Nationalism and sinister glee aside, there’s a multitude of losses piling up and how we turn them into personal assets, or even a heart of gratitude and goodwill, I don’t know.

And therein is the challenge, dear ones, the challenge of a lifetime.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Perfect cinnamon buns

So the sticky buns got made. Eleven beautiful roll-ups of sweet yeast dough, butter and cinnamon sugar got laid on the maple goodness, which readers will remember was about five gallons worth of syrup rescued after over boiling, and were baked to golden doneness. In flipping them onto the oval platter, given to me by my dear father, a bit of syrup rolled off onto my thumb. The searing heat burned deep into my consciousness. I thought of it as the final kiss.

But the buns were delicious and I took them to the Fellowship on Sunday, not wanting to invite further wrath of any god who might, or might not, be watching for any sign of hoarding.

It was a good thing to do.

The reaction was one of gratitude. Many had read of my adventures and were in anticipation of the buns' wholesome goodness. Pronounced by some as the best ever, and encouraged by others that if I was experimenting I should bring the next batch, I was pleased to have company on my ridiculous adventure.

I had sent out a notice to some of my friends informing them that I was, once again, continuing my blog. In the subject line was the words, “Misery loves company?”

Amy wrote back, “I like to think it is not just misery that loves company but humanness that needs affirmation/companionship (not to mention a sense of humor) along the way.

I have to agree.

I was so happy, in the end, to have company with my trials with the syrup. Unfortunately, the sap is flowing much slower now with the cool weather, and it’s not nearly as clear. I don’t know if I’ll get any maple syrup and the burning all of my sap could have been, in one sense, a fatal mistake. But sharing the mishap with others brought it to a different dimension.

I guess what I learn from that is precisely what Amy writes: it’s not so much our accomplishments or even our ability to make our own way, or produce our own syrup as the case may be. Rather, our lives are made meaningful by that which we share, and perhaps, unfortunately, our human foibles are the most lovable of all.

Go figure.

The buns really were perfect.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Being me

Last night, I burned all of the maple sap that I had been boiling down since Saturday. It was easily done. After dinner, I poured the almost one gallon’s worth of sap collected that day into the shallow pan, turned on the two-burner electric stovetop on the porch and went to do my homework. Some two hours later, it was burnt sugar, mostly.

I was furious. Jumping up and down in the kitchen, I yelled to the universe and to Stephen who was standing there, “I AM AN IDIOT.”

“Don’t say that,” he said to me.

I can’t remember if I jumped up and down a few more times, but I know I yelled again, “I AM AN IDIOT.”

He didn’t question my adamancy any further.

And as serious as I thought it was in the moment, the burning of some four days worth of effort, I actually couldn’t muster much more than that.

“I’m just so frustrated being me,” I said to that dear husband of mine.

I imagine that he must have been into conversation because he asked me, “What is it about being you that is so frustrating?”

I never answered his question.

I strained the hot burned sugar syrup through a felt liner, buttered a shallow dish and poured it in, thinking it would form some sort of maple brittle. I chopped up some of the smoked almonds from a tin in the pantry, sprinkled them on top, and left the kitchen to feel sorry for my distraction in the living room.

Again, I couldn’t muster that much ire. This morning, I was thankful that I didn’t start a fire on the porch.

Underneath the loss is the true knowledge that a couple of days ago I saw that I was creating maple syrup. I wasn’t sure whether to pour it off into a jar, to carefully process it on the kitchen stove later, or to pour new sap in. I asked Stephen what he thought and he seemed to agree with me that for the consistency of the batch, keeping the same pan going would be the best thing to do. With the increased sugar content, the new sap was evaporating much faster. But I knew there was the chance of burning – in fact this morning I told Stephen that I knew that the syrup would burn.

So if I had to articulate what it is that is frustrating about being me, I would answer that I am tired of knowing exactly what needs to be done and not doing it.

And why I do that, I have no idea.

Although now I know that the consequence, at least in this particular instance, is the burning of four days of maple sap.

The maple candy I hoped I was making didn’t get hard enough, and tomorrow, when I make a variety of bread for the “Awakening the Dreamer” workshop on Saturday, I shall use that thick, but soft, maple candy with smoked almonds as the bottom layer for the most wonderful sticky buns ever. I know it to be true, because there is at least five gallons of home-collected maple sap in the recipe.

I supposed that if we're not going to listen to that inner voice of wisdom, we just have to keep on going and it all, surprisingly, turns out in the end.

The late Dr. Howard Patton used to say, "It is what it is," and I have to admit that's my experience being me.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Meditation on spring

From the March 15 Upper Delaware Unitarian Universalist Fellowship:

I. Opening Words: By Wendell Berry
Through the weeks of deep snow
We walked above the ground
on fallen sky, as though we did
not come of root and leaf, as though
we had only air and weather
for our difficult home.

But now
as March warms, and the rivulets
run like birdsong on the slopes,
and the branches of light sing in the hills,
slowly we return to earth.

II. Meditation: By Laurie Stuart
Indeed, slowly we return to earth.
We breathe a sigh of relief as winter
unlocks its grip from our landscape,
from our footpaths,
from the fear in our hearts that somehow
the cold and the snow will spin our lives
out of control,
leaving us
with the wreck of the world,
without the ability
to make our way,
to feed ourselves, clothe
ourselves, fend away doubt
and all of the niggling details
that are sure to be our downfall.

Indeed, slowly we return to earth and to this
community which has the ability
to support us, despite
the world economy, despite
environmental degradation, a haven
of spirit and love available always,
as long as we remember.

Remember that it is available to us.
Remember it is available for us.
Remember that we can equally be
the source as well as the culmination,
part and parcel of the ebb and flow.

Remembering that we are
ourselves a part of some whole
that exists beyond us,
through us
giving to us, and receiving from us
our thanks and blessings.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Guaranteed sweetness

On Saturday morning, the silver maple that I planted in the side yard some twenty-three years ago got tapped for the first time. I’m not sure what made me think to ask whether a silver maple could yield maple syrup and the question could have easily come in the form of a regret: “I really wish that I had planted a sugar maple instead of the silver one.”

Nonetheless, once spoken then answered.

Silver maples can indeed be tapped in the spring for their sap, but the sugar content is not as high as a sugar maple and, therefore, takes a bit more boiling down. More Internet research yields the equation that sap needs to boil down at a ratio of about 40 to one to get to the sugar content and consistency of fine maple syrup.

So what that means is that with the three gallons or so of sap that have flowed into the bucket since Saturday, it would boil down to about one cup of syrup. As Stephen reminds me that one cup of syrup is no small amount, I realize that getting a huge amount of syrup is not my goal. Being able to create some sort of sweetener is more to the point.

The Internet also relates that a tree can give anywhere from one quart to one gallon in each sap run, meaning the time between when the sap starts to flow with the warmth of the sun to the time that the night chill shuts it down. My tree is yielding at least a gallon each day. The run will last for two to three weeks.

We had squash soup for dinner tonight, using a few of the butternut squash that has been wintering in the basement. As they were starting to get soft, we cut the remaining ones up and processed them for freezing. I imagine these frozen quantities will get us through to August, when a new batch is ready for harvest.

I am thankful for the abundance of the land and feel satisfied with this home-grown sustenance.

The sap drips into the bucket one drip at a time, and I marvel and take comfort in knowing that over time all of our mini steps, starts and stops bring some measure of sweetness into the world.

For sure.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Life's weavings

My office floor is littered with books--poetry collections, anthologies of wisdom stories. Small white cards poke out of the pages, a road map for finding my way back to pages, poems and readings that will be woven together into Sunday's worship service at the Upper Delaware Unitarian Universalist Fellowship on giving and receiving.

While I wish I could work a little bit more in advance, I like this process of going through resources, immersing myself in the wisdom of others, and mining bits and pieces that will make up a new whole. Sometimes I think that it would be a joy to write all of the pieces of a particular worship, from opening words, prayers, homily and benediction, but I am equally attracted to the process as a weaver, threading words, thought, story and song together through a warp of a particular topic and a specific lens of meaning.

I always find useful pieces in the story collection in the “Kitchen Table Wisdom” by Rachel Naomi Remen, and this afternoon I was touched by story about Rachel herself. She tells of a time when she needed to make a choice between accepting a promotion through her hospital work where she is feeling alienated and following her instinct to go into a less conventional form of healing. She receives the gift of “The Prophet” from a new friend and finds herself taken by one of the illustrations of an eye in the middle of the palm. It seems familiar to her.

She learns that it is the traditional Hindu symbol of a healer.

Soon after, on a visit with her mother, she hears that as a child of four, she would take her father’s fountain pen and draw eyes in the palms of her hands. Then she would hold her hands up on either side of her face, palms facing forward, close her eyes and say, “Now I can see you,” and laugh.

“Sometimes you wouldn’t let us wash your hands for days,” her mother tells her.

Rachel realizes that in her role as a pediatrician she washes her hands thirty to forty times a day and surmises that she has long washed away the healing symbol. Soon after that, she quits her hospital job to find her lost eyes.

While the story seems to mimics my own journey right now, and I spontaneously sob for a few moments, it is not apropos to the topic and I move on.

Sometimes we have a plan and collect the pieces that we weave into our endeavors or into our lives. And sometimes, we simply stumble upon the treasures that we didn’t know of before and a whole new form takes shape.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Musings on the day

Looking out my home office window, with the sun shining and the wind moving the upper branches of the white pine trees that surround my three acres of paradise, I thought it was a whole lot warmer than it actually was.

Yesterday, it was about 60 degrees, and somehow I thought it was the same today.

I could have easily looked at the thermometer--a Christmas gift from my dear father in Vermont, which is digitally and wirelessly connected to a sensor on the back porch whose counterpart sits upon the upright piano-in-need-of-tuning in the living room and displays the inside temperature, the outside temperature and the time--and seen that it was a mere 33 degrees. But I didn’t check it as I suited up for a walk in the middle of the afternoon.

With Dodger--my hairy and sweet, soon-to-be-13-year-old retriever-chow mix of a dog--anxious at the door, I put on a hat and gloves. Good thing, because it was cold. All that is to say that sometimes our assumptions, based on what we perceive, are not always correct.

My days are spent in self-education. From gas drilling e-mail messages, which have complicated studies attached, to graduate-level discussions pertaining to whatever class I am taking (World Religions, this semester), I follow the threads left for me, at bit like Hansel and Gretel lost in the woods following a breadcrumb trail. They, and I, seem to be searching for our way back home, or maybe a route through the present and into the future that will bring us to a clarification of our place in the world.

And given this metaphor, the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale, I suspect I needn't worry about the outcome of my quest. As far as I remember, they find their way out of the forest, into the light, and back to their loving father.

But wait a minute, wasn’t the original problem that their father was in the clutches of an evil step-mother? Am I working under the assumption that all fairy tales work out in the end? Could that stepmother be another metaphor for any number of post-modern-day scourges like natural gas drilling in pristine areas or corporate greed? Like the day looking like yesterday when actually it is itself in the present moment?

Whoosh, who can tell?

Not me.

Even so, today’s threads brought me the story of Cat Stevens, who abandoned stardom for allegiance to Islam. His story is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcgCdn8I8kU&NR=1

I was intrigued, as was the documentary, that the messages in the songs that Cat Stevens was singing and writing for a very long time were prophetic to his future life. Consider his hit, "Father and Son" and the constant refrain "I know I have to go away." This line mirrored his giving up his music career to become a humanitarian serving a higher purpose.

His conversion begins with an experience of swimming out beyond the waves at Malibu and realizing that the current is taking him away from shore and that he is going to drown. "Lord," he says, "If you save me, I will serve you." Just then, he relates, a wave came that pushed him shoreward and he found enough strength to swim. Standing on solid ground, he rejoined the living.

I can only hope that something like this will happen to me. Perhaps in my following of bread crumbs or email-Internet threads, I will be led to a new morning where revelation will guide me forward.

Perhaps I will meet you there.

Friday, March 06, 2009

Beyond comprehension

I have to admit that this whole gas drilling activity has my head spinning. The idea of using millions of gallons of clean water to harvest an energy that’s best left in the ground is a crazy idea to begin with, and it’s over the top when it comes to imagining that this risky behavior will be done in an exceptional value watershed. But it just keeps on coming.

I heard this week that the gas company that is seeking a permit for five wells in Peas Eddy, NY, in the Town of Hancock, somewhere in close proximity of the headwaters of the Upper Delaware River, have included in their application to the NY Department of Conservation (DEC) a plan to dispose of the “produced” water in injection wells. What this means is that the clean water to which chemicals and biocides have been added, which is then used to violently fracture the shale deep within the earth, amidst naturally occurring radioactive materials, heavy metals and salt, will be put back into the earth, for eternity.

While I’m no scientist, basic knowledge tells us that “what goes up, must come down. And since everything is itself and its opposite, the reverse is true: “What goes down, must come up.” Which is just an interesting way to say that the injected poison water is probably not going to stay put. And while geological science might very well contradict this gut analysis, industry experience in Texas shows that there is a tremendous amount of surface contamination that occurs during the injecting procedure. So much so that officials in Broome County don’t want the DEC to allow injection wells.

Bottom line: Those officials are right; it’s simply not a good idea. And it’s especially not a good idea in an important watershed.

I get it that no one knows what to do with this caustic water besides either injecting it into the ground or spreading it on dirt roads. Unfortunately, spreading the contaminated water on roads kills all the vegetation and, undoubtedly, although I haven’t read it, runs off into brooks and streams.

But getting back to Peas Eddy: The fact this is the first place that the gas companies have targeted, complete with the crazy idea to just put the poison back in the ground, is something that boggles the mind of someone like me. The idea that the first drilling will be within the vicinity of the headwaters of the Upper Delaware is almost prophetic because in its height of irresponsibility, it has the potential of allowing us, and our regulatory bodies, to wake up and say, “Huh, you want to do what? No way.”

But “no way” doesn’t seem to be the response. In fact,“anyway, just get it done,” seems to be the preferred reaction.

And quite honestly, that’s beyond my comprehension. What about you?