Plant Whatever Brings You Joy

Hello, dear readers,

Way back in 2009 I did a quite thorough post about bags, meaning the ones we carry to the market or to stores to bring our purchases home in, so as to be very responsible in helping to reduce plastic bags and paper bags use. At that time I was not in the habit of always bringing bags along, and I knew that if I did a post about bags, and researched consciously my choices, I would find the best solution for my own needs. And I thought I had. At that time I concluded I would be most likely to use the big ones that have a flat bottom and handles on top. But, in fact, I ended up using the ones I could pop into my purse and have at the ready anytime needed. I found them less bulky and much easier to actually have with me at any given time. And I do that now, meticulously. They are inexpensive. They are colorful. They wash readily. The only thing I have to do to maintain the practice is to take the time to roll them back up and snap them in place so they are tucked into my purse at the bottom, not getting in the way. The ones I’m currently using look like this:

And when they are properly rolled up, they condense down to this:

Handy, right? And I always have them at the ready. And they carry a lot.

But I did have a hole in my routine, as I was still grabbing plastic bags for individual vegetable and fruit purchases. There are those in this community who pop them unwrapped into their shopping baskets but I must be too fastidious to do this. I start thinking of where those carts have been and what they have been carrying. Eeeuuu. And then a marvelous thing happened. A woman behind me in line at the health food store laid out a few sheer white bags full of vegetables on the counter and I said, “Oh, wow. Where did you get those?” And as convenient fate would have it, they were for sale in a display near the door! So I grabbed a few. This is what they look like rolled up:

And here is what they look like ready for use:

Aren’t they wonderful?? I am so happy to have this solution to that particular ecological need. The packaging says, “Reuse once a week. Reduce as many as 150 plastic bags a year!” I can easily imagine that is true! They are called 3bbags. I’m sure you can google them.

I’d love to hear what solutions you have found to reduce your consumption of plastic and paper bags, and I hope this post inspires you to add another layer, as I just did!

Kitchen blessings,
Kathryn xoxoxo

Book News: On Sunday morning I was the guest of Lillian Brummet on “Conscious Discussions”, a radio show out of British Columbia. Link here. A review of Plant Whatever Brings You Joy was featured on The Ripple Revolution blog! And on Friday I’m looking forward to doing an Author Meet and Greet at 2:00PM at Copperfield’s Books in Healdsburg in Sonoma County! I hope some of you might stop by!

Posted on May 7th, 2013 by Kathryn
Filed under: People at Life | 13 Comments »

Book Notes: The Outermost House by Henry Beston

A recent trip to the vet on behalf of one of my kitties found me waiting in what serves as the acupuncture room. Quietly awaiting I began to explore the room. A framed quote caught my eye and as it was mounted quite high, I pulled it off the wall to read more carefully. Here is what it said:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

I was deeply moved, as this quote resonated with the deepest part of my being and I have many times tried to vocalize some of these same thoughts, but never so eloquently! But who wrote it? There was no author attributed. When I arrived home I typed in a portion of the quote and thus began my introduction to Henry Beston, the author of The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, which I promptly ordered. There is a synchronicity to this finding, as I’ve been thinking a lot about the Cape these last few months. I have a very old friend, a former teacher I met when I was doing my student teaching in college in Ohio, who has lived on the Cape for years. She took me there once, all the way out to Provincetown. I think once one has been to the Cape it is not forgotten.
Apparently this is what happened to Henry Beston, who, in 1926, after having someone build him a small house on the Cape where he might on occasion visit, he writes, “I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go.”

Henry subsequently spends a year on the Cape in his small, but comfortable home, documenting, as a naturalist, all the things he bears witness to on those dunes, at the sea’s edge. His adventure closes and he becomes engaged and his future wife tells him she will marry him only when the book is done. 🙂

It would be easy and natural to compare Beston to Thoreau, and while one might call them kindred spirits, Beston is a very different kind of man and writer.

His writing is authentic and speaks to issues of our day without the political layers intrinsic to Thoreau, thus, perhaps, capturing a different, and maybe even a wider audience. The copy I secured is stamped as the “75th Anniversary Edition”. I’m happy to bring his work to the attention of my readers. I’m certain many will find nurturance in Beston’s writings.

Touch the earth, love the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and the dawn seen over the ocean from the beach.

When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.

Happy reading!

Love and spring blessings,
Kathryn xoxo

Footnote: Some of you will find it interesting that Beston’s outermost house was proclaimed a National Literary Landmark in 1964, however it was unfortunately destroyed in a massive winter storm in 1978.

Posted on April 13th, 2013 by Kathryn
Filed under: Book Notes | 8 Comments »

Contest! Name These Plants and Win a Book!

Dearest Readers,

Okey dokey. Contest time! For the last two weeks I’ve been scouting around for plants that just might elude ready naming! I might be wrong. There are probably whiz kids among you who can Name Them All. Well, that would be a good thing for YOU, as you would be the winner of a copy of Plant Whatever Brings You Joy: Blessed Wisdom from the Garden. And this contest is open to everybody everywhere, so whoever is first able to name accurately all the plants pictured below will receive a free copy of my book, shipping covered regardless of where you live on planet Earth. 🙂 To be fair, this will entail keeping all comments in the moderation cue until the contest is won, for obvious reasons. Once a winner is named, I will post all comments at once. Fair? Yes? Okey dokey! Ready! Set! GO!

Number one: