Midsummer Dreaming

Photo of daily work in process by Adrienne Chadwick

The road to our individual and collective 'promised land' is not easy by any means. But it is strewn with petals of love, signs of encouragement and signals of inevitability. We must each use our human gifts and free will to accomplish exactly what we envision for ourselves - to do anything otherwise is to jeopardize the interdependent trajectory to our shared desire for a safe, abundant, sustainable future.

TheSecretGarden

Back to the Basics

As a mom of two young boys, I invest a lot in their future.  Today, at the dawn of this 21^st century, I often wonder: what will they truly need in order to live a healthy, happy, fulfilled life to its fullest? (As visions of ad logos dance in my head.) More space, money, cars…? Does more lead to fulfillment? Happiness?

Of course, as a mom, I want my children to always have what they need to live a full and productive life.  And now, more than ever, I think and worry about how our basic building blocks of life – air, water, earth – seem increasingly in peril.  And so, part of the investment I make in my children’s future is feeding them with food that is as safe and nutritious as possible.  But I also think about how far that food has traveled and how much water and energy was used to produce it.

We are hearing much about drought and water shortage these days, I know that we are going to feel that too, before the arrival of rainy season here in South Florida.  Did you know that throughout the US, a good 50% of our national water supply goes into the food we eat? It can take 200 gallons of water to produce a pound of beans.  A pound of beef can take over 2,000 gallons of water to produce.

Another thing that we feel here in South Florida is the real need for clean air that is cooled down to a liveable temperature. In the US almost 50% of our energy use is in heating and cooling homes and buildings.

But we have structures available to us to build our homes, businesses and public buildings in ways that use less than ¼ of that heating/ cooling energy.  And there are farming systems that grow food with minimal inputs of energy, water and chemicals. We just need to utilize them!

Climate change is happening, no matter how many $$$ you put into denying it.  Our temperatures overall are rising, ice sheets are retreating, and we have only one choice: ADAPT.

So that is what I teach my children – creativity, adaptation, and the importance of observing and considering the cycles and patterns of nature in all our actions and decisions.  It is what our ancestors have done, and it is the only way we will successfully navigate the changing times ahead.

We – our whole planet – are an ecosystem.  And yes, we are diverse, competitive, and at times, ruthless.  But we are all interconnected, bound together by our commonality and our dependence on the air, soil and life blood of our first mother – Earth.

Tara Chadwick works as a community outreach consultant for Earth Learning and would like to invite you to the 2014 Local Food Enterprise Summit in Miami May 31-June 2. Registration information is available at www.financialpermaculture.com, spaces are filling quickly.

   

It is time for us ALL to rise!

Climate, drought, floods, storms, damage, rebuilding, resilience, adaptation. It is time for us to rise!

A very
urban
bald
eagle
came
over to
look
for fish
in the
lake
as I
began
to
write
today.

Throughout the years of my teenage-hood, I carried within me a vision of “what I want to be when I grow up.” And despite the fact that I am a born and raised city girl, I knew from a very young age that my life desire was to learn about who I am as a part-Maya woman, and to work toward a time when I would have the skills, capacity and connectedness to sustain my own life using materials and resources that occur naturally on the Earth.

It seems a very practical and noble vision today, but in the progressive days of the 1980’s, a life goal of self-sustainability, self-sovereignty (though I could not describe it that way in those days) was seen as overly humble, too modest, and even today is often regarded as unrealistic.  And yet, one cannot undo one’s vision.  It can be designed, planned and implemented, even tweaked or reformatted, but that underpinning image, the reality with which it is emblazoned in one’s soul, and the memories of recalling it over many years of reflections just simply cannot be undone…

And so, I continue to move along on my life path, carrying memories of learning, experiences of doing, relationships (at least some of them anyways), and I realize, to my surprise, that I am on a journey toward the completion of a great circle!  Watching carefully how the weather patterns are changing, how our food and access to it is being modified, I wonder where the other 99% were when I was sitting in 9^th grade geography class listening to Mr. Thompson teach us about the two possible scenarios that would occur due to the increasing greenhouse effect… I am so confused by climate change skepticism.

But I am also more certain than ever now that my choices to live a humble life in pursuit of happiness, freedom and harmony with Mother Nature are more than responsibilities, these footsteps are my legacy…

April 28, 2014

Pinelands Park

Check out my weekly news publication "Mother Nature Chronicles" 

or follow my daily tweets @wabigun

Spring 2014 - The season of regeneration has arrived!

I spent the day of the equinox sorting corn soup corn seeds thanks to George & Syd Martin's kind sharing of their precious seeds, instructions and memories at winter ceremonies 2012

It’s a beautifully cool and grey morning here in South Florida, the spring season has arrived and with it the excited sounds of the birds whose beautiful songs seem to reach new heights of pitch and melody…

I can’t say that I miss the raw wind, snow and cold that so easily penetrate one’s final layers of resistance to the winters of the northern latitudes, especially this year where the average daily temperatures reached far below any recent human memory.

But I do miss the beauty of the snow, the intricate interplay of geometry and light we see reflected on a single snowflake, I miss the warm coffee stops on cold days, and I especially miss feeling the comraderie of people working together to keep their families and communities intact even in the face of such bone chilling environmental realities… the fridgidity of the weather I think helps to cultivate the warmth of people’s hearts…

In many ways, I have found Minnesota and Florida polar opposites, in terms of much more than the obvious weather patterns. There are so many people here, four times as many at least.  And the social disparities while they are obvious in Minnesota, are as amplified in South Florida as the temperature difference on an average early spring day.

The bio diversity of plant, insects and humans is incredibly rich and beautiful, but the relationships that exist between us all seem as fragile as the scanty layer of subtropical topsoil which, fertile though it is, takes 1000 years to produce just one inch of fine, silty soil over the porous limestone that is our area’s bedrock (hence the litany of sinkholes that seem to be opening at an increasingly rapid rate).

Getting to know and understand a new geography is a daunting, seemingly lifelong task.  But the exercise in trying leads to the realization that our parents and grandparents, wherever they are from, were grounded in the knowledge of how to best utilize the gifts of the land and its processes, in a way that also preserved and ensured their continuity in perpetuity.  This regenerative use philosophy, I am now coming to see, is encoded in our cultural, family and community values, traditions and the teachings we pass on to our children and loved ones.  Many of the things we don’t do anymore because we don’t have to, are the very things that contribute to our success in sustaining the ecosystem that we depend on. (Think of the things our grandparents make fun of us for not knowing or doing anymore… walk to school, haul water, chop wood, empty the chamber pot, keep a compost…)

For the few who remember and find ways to replicate and share these treasures of knowledge that others have cast off as “old,” with the connotation of no longer useful or valuable, our future generations of human beings will be eternally grateful to you.  For those who can, LISTEN, LEARN & PRACTICE!  Our grandparents do not stay with us forever, so spend time with them when you can, ask questions, and above all, remember what stories of nature they tell you… OUR grandchildren will have many questions about the world and our place in it and they will need to hear us tell them the stories from the land of our grandparents.

Happy Spring!  Wherever we are right now, let's plant seeds that will feed our minds and bodies with nutrient dense soul food… and milkweed… please plant extra milkweed for our friendly neighborhood pollinators.

Corn boy exploring the permaculture plantings

Links:

Free milkweed plants, seeds and monarch larvae

Microbiology of subtropical karst soils 

Amazing how many of our grandparents used these foods! 

A Plug for Earth Learning and the Financial Permaculture Institute

EL 3.0.2

A blog by T.A.Chadwick

2.25.13

We are now at the midpoint of the winter season, and regardless of one’s relative geographic location, nature is relentlessly reminding us: you know what to do… you know you can do better… you must take another step… the wind whispers our instructions, blue jays never let us forget, butterflies, bees and hummingbirds gently enforce Earth’s patterns and cycles.

Our growing collective human realization that we must do our part to regenerate Earth’s biosystems is an awareness that’s fostering a renewed focus on sustainability and a closer examination of the intersection of economy, finance, business development and an ancient concept with a pointedly contemporary potential for innovation:  permaculture.

Permaculture, in a nutshell, is designing human systems that replicate and regenerate Earth’s natural processes.  Financial permaculture is “working with local communities to create holistic and regenerative economic solutions for local and international sustainability.”

On May 31 – June 4, Earth Learning and the Financial Permaculture Institute are hosting the 2014 Local Food Enterprise (LiFE) Summit in Miami to continue building local food infrastructure here in the Greater Everglades bioregion. This is an open call to participate as a trainee, investor or food lover!  Our objective is to engage entrepreneurs and consumers in growing the local ecology of “a life sustaining culture” to expand access to delicious food grown safely and sustainably right here in the Greater Everglades.

Four local food enterprises will serve as this year’s design clients.  Everyone who registers as a LiFE Summit participant will have the opportunity to join one of four design teams who will work together to develop real-time, case-specific permaculture business/ farm/ enterprise models for each design client to implement.

Registration is open now for the week-long Summit or the keynote lectures only, including the final evening’s unveiling and launch of the newly designed Local Food Enterprises!

Sign up today and refer a friend to get rooted in “growing a life-sustaining culture here in the Greater Everglades bioregion.”

--- END----

www.earth-learning.org

www.financialpermaculture.com

www.financialpermaculture.org

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Earth-Learning/90916298638

https://www.facebook.com/events/629828743747455/

View from the rearview: on gardening, environment, health and remembering Grandfather Bob from the Elders' Lodge in St. Paul

  

      Cone Flower

Squash blossom

Ahsayma

… as I stooped over wiping salty sweat from my brow, a grandfather sauntered over, assessing my work, and engaging me in banter:  “So you think you know something about gardening, eh?  You think you know something about growing tobacco?”  With a smile, I denied knowing anything about anything, and replied that I was doing my best to tackle the task at hand, pulling weeds.  Kindly, the grandfather shared a little bit of his personal history as he instructed me to be sure to pull the weeds out by the root, so they don’t come back.  He shared that he had grown tobacco “about forty years ago” and recounted how indigenous gardeners would always weed from the root.  He contrasted that with the gardening techniques used by European settlers, which require much more repeat weeding as well as the use of herbicides and fertilizers.  By pulling the weeds out by the root, and letting them dry around the garden, the naturally occurring vegetation provides a natural source for fertilizing the soil once the garden’s productive season has come to completion.  “Burn all the weeds and other plants once the growing season is over, and then turn it all into the soil.  That will make the plants more healthy the next season,” he instructed. 

There were other things as well.  “Mound up the earth around each plant to protect the roots.  Do this each time you weed, before you water.  That way, the nutrients in the soil stay with the plant.”  Grandfather Bob brought the tradition of gardening that he learned as a young man growing up on the reservation to the urban youth of today and shared that knowledge again with a mom and her toddler at the Elders Lodge garden planted and tended by multi generational members of the community who are working to ensure that our methods of subsistence, physically, mentally and spiritually are remembered, practiced and maintained for the generations of the future.

  

 

Grandmother Emma Gurneau

Grandmother Eileen Hudon and her helpers

The Indigenous Peoples Task Force (IPTF) started out as a task force to monitor and take action against the growing epidemic of HIV and AIDS that is rapidly plaguing the American Indian community in Minnesota (American Indian heterosexual women represent one of the fastest growing demographic groups in acquiring new HIV cases, slightly more cases per population are being reported in the African American and Latino/a communities).

In the first few years, IPTF’s activities were centered largely around issues of HIV transmission reduction, and counseling people living with HIV about dealing with a terminal illness.  There were many losses of family, friends and colleagues in those early years.  Then the medical establishment released new regimes of chemicalized plants, animal parts and minerals which have resulted in huge increases in the lifespans of people living with HIV and AIDS.

Consequently, there are more clients, living longer lives, despite their immuno-compromised state.  A longer lifespan has given rise to a host of new community needs and desires in this post HIV antiviral drug era.  People living with HIV/ AIDS now live long enough to notice that smoking has a drastic negative impact on their health.  And because the life expectancy is longer, though still much more fragile than the average non-immunocompromised individual, health impacts such as environmental toxins, air pollution, soil contamination and water quality and safety have become a major factor in discussions and daily decision making surrounding lifestyle choices for optimal healthy living.

The acceptable safe levels or TMDL’s of toxic and carcinogen substances that are allowed by government regulatory agencies cannot be accurately measured for people living with HIV.  Nor can the impacts of unregulated toxic emissions and unsafe disposal of harmful chemicals into the air, soil or water.  Hence the City of Minneapolis Drinking Water Quality Report notice that “Immuno-compromised people such as people undergoing chemotherapy, …organ transplants, … HIV/ AIDS… elderly, and infants….should seek advice about drinking water from their health care providers.” (2005 & 2006)

As indigenous people, we are still struggling for our very survival, still seeking to ensure that there will be a place and a way for our future generations to emerge and take root in the rocky soil that is our world today.  So we seek out the elders, and do our best to tease out the helpful teachings, guidance and snippets of useful wisdom that they may offer.  We use our technology and our teachings to try to ask the questions that our children will need answered years hence.  And we ask for information to be forthcoming from the scientists and policy analysts who know by measure what is happening, but are too often reverted to silence or unintelligibility.

As we engage in this game of strategy, of wits or apathy, we find that our many paths do, in fact converge and cross at many places, not just one.  Our health department warns us, do not drink this water, while our traditional teachers remind us how to make our own filters.  Our surgeon general proclaims smoking a health hazard; our elders tell us to snip  the flowers off three times and let the fourth set of buds go to seed.  The environmental government agency tells us that our soil is contaminated so much that playing in it poisons our children; our traditional gardeners show us how to mound up the soil around plants that will form new soil and burn the pulled weeds at the end of the growing season to fertilize in a way that protects our children from harm.

As we struggle to live our lives, however long or short they may turn out to be, in a way that is consistent with the values and instructions that we each maintain out of our desire and free will as independent human beings, we learn by our experience, and we remember just how pitifully interdependent we are with everything that lives, breaths or moves.

As our water becomes more and more contaminated through the air, on the land and under the earth; as we search the databases for lakes whose fish are not contaminated with mercury and pcb’s; as we wonder what to feed our children with every new outbreak of mad cow, brucellosis and avian flu; we know that we must pray, and that praying alone is not enough.  We must learn, we must know and we must act.

Our surgeon general reminded us that smoking causes premature death.  We remembered the Onkwehowe tobacco growers and sought out 600 year old seeds that had been passed down from generations through our history of migration, trade and commerce.  We were warned that it is our responsibility alone to ensure the health and vitality of our water.  Our grandmothers are beginning to stand up and teach all of the women whose mothers were not able to teach them about the relationship of women to water.  Our food is being altered by scientific experiments that have yet to be proven into laws.  Our children are reminding us how to reduce our household waste by choosing what we buy carefully, composting at our homes or apartments and using the new soil to grow healthy greens, herbs and vegetables.  And, of course, tobacco.  Sacred tobacco.  Planted next to the tomatoes and peppers who are their family members in the world of zuyawgikeeg.  Hang them to dry before the first frost so the leaves don’t get mushy.  And don’t forget that the seeds will fall out of their little cases, so collect them ever so carefully for post-winter planting once the sun warms enough to heat a southern window for the whole afternoon.

Whatever happens, we will always have the knowledge, the wisdom and the technology to do what we need to; as long as we make sure we have the faith, the desire and the discipline to seek and carry out tasks and instructions that we receive.

Bawshkeeng Wabigun

text c. 2006

photos c. 2011

Epilogue:  Grandfather Bob left us some years ago, and the text only version of this post originally appeared on the IPTF website when I was working there back in 2006, but after finding and reading it again today, this piece seems to have gained a new currency in light of the recent chemical and oil spills.

Welcoming Winter

12.27.13

Welcoming Winter

Standing with my sons and sister on the southern shore of the East Coast, footsteps away from the busy Hollywood Broadwalk, one of those special moments emerges as we watch white, foamy waves fold over the slowly shifting sand.  Wind swirls our thoughts all around as we marvel at Peruvian planting star constellations rising from the dark expanse of ocean.  Even here, in the center of this urban vacation destination, the timeless cycles of Earth’s natural ecology remind us how to live.

(photo courtesy my sister, Adrienne Chadwick

via https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10202830475831353&set=a.1960803948172.117479.1485008512&type=1&theater)

Every step in our journey is a movement toward remembering.

Allow me to introduce myself.  Bawshkeengwabigun indizhinikawz.  I am what you could call, a returning snowbird…  born on the north shores of Lake Ontario, to a mother from Belize on the Western edge of the Carribbean Sea and a father from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.  I’ve lived in Florida before, a few times… but my migration is on a longer cycle than our annual orbit around the sun…

My life path seems to take me to all the places where I have learning and work to do… Toronto (birthland), to Florida (home), back to Toronto, to Belize (homeland), Wisconsin, Minnesota (edge of birthland bioregion) and finally back here to Florida once again. I love retracing the paths that our ancestors took, crisscrossing this northern central region of our continent (although, I have learned that geography is always relative – in relation to the perspective of who is perceiving it… my friend Lucy Idlout from Iqaluit, Nunavut always refers to Toronto as “the South”… with all its foreign flora, fauna, and her favorite – insects… always wonder what Lucy would think of the Amazon…)

Welcoming in Winter here in South Florida – Zone 10 or 11 according to the USDA, with less than 5 days per year below 45 degrees, and none below 30 – was a strangely wonderful experience… one that will continue to encourage and remind me to watch, listen and participate fully in this exciting time during the history of our Earth….

Every step in our journey is a movement toward remembering.

I am excited about returning home here to “the Greater Everglades bioregion”, curious about the learning I have ahead of me and wondering, of the things I love to do, what will I get to share with my family, friends and neighbors here… wild food harvesting… camping… community organizing… dancing…?

With active patience… we shall see … watch, and listen, and work… and we shall see….

@wabigun

wabigun@yahoo.com

www.facebook.com/tara.chadwick.391