Can you relate?

Today is Thursday. That means it's pick up day at WEI's CSA (week 14). First, though, we stopped at Peterson's in North Branch to get a 50 pond bag of sunflower seeds for the birds. It was a nice day for a drive. Along the road between North Branch and Amador we noticed little color but a number of oaks that appeared to have dead leaves. As we got closer to the farm and the St. Croix, there was more color but nothing yet spectacular. Here, see for yourself.

fall colors starting to show     © harrington

The other thing we noticed was a number of turkey vultures soaring in a southerly direction. Beginning migration? Now that we've covered the local updates, there's a blog posting I want to be sure you know about. Kaid Benfield had a post yesterday on the Natural Resources Defense Council's "Switchboard" blog, City sustainability is about the environment, even when it isn't. Before he gets into little libraries, he makes reference to the idea that "If our urban solutions don’t work for people – if we don’t make cities wonderful places to live, work, and play – they will never sustain enough favor to work for the planet." That seems to me a lot like what we've talked about when we claimed that we need to make great cities to protect the environment. I don't know if John Muir was the first to notice, but I do know his memorable (and accurate) observation "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." Sustainability is about relationships. If we want to have a viable future for our children and our grandchildren and their children, we'd best try to keep this in mind. Relationships, and values. Now, here's another perspective of today's fall colors and following that, a different perspective on the impact of relationships on the world.

 fall colors barely noticeable     © harrington

Laws of the Universe

By Albert Goldbarth

The renewal project is doomed: because

its funding board’s vice-president resigned: because   

the acids of divorce were eating day-long   

at her stomach, at her thoughts: because

her husband was neglecting her, in favor of his daughter,

who was dying: because her husband,

bi and edgy, bore an AIDS sore that was ripe   

enough with fear and woe to throw this whole   

thick network of connections off its balance

and down a hole of human misery. Haven’t we seen it happen?   

—when a crowded room at a party was tilted   

perilously askew by the weight of two   

wept tears that weren’t as large as a housefly’s wings,   

that couldn’t have filled a pistachio shell.

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