Biking in the Bosque

Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, is personally facilitating a twelve-week workshop on her book Sunday afternoons in Santa Fe, where she now lives. It is a course on discovering and recovering your creative self. Along with forty other painters, poets, graphic designers, musicians, photographers and writers, I am privileged and honored to be participating. Julia has expressed her creativity as an award-winning journalist writing for the Washington Post, New York Times, Rolling Stone and Vogue. She has been a film and television writer, director and producer of independent features and documentaries, a novelist, playwright, songwriter and poet. She has published over thirty books.

So, what does this have to do with biking in the bosque (forest along the banks of the Rio Grande)? This is the way women often talk, think and write, spiraling around the topic, exploring adjunct nuances, instead of just making their point. My topic this week is guidance, and I’m getting there.

Julia assigns homework each week including two twenty-minute walks on your own without a dog. Forty minutes of weekly walking isn’t the best match for a person using a walker and scheduled for hip replacement surgery May 14th. I substituted feeding blue corn to the cranes for several weeks until they migrated north ten days ago. This week I decided to substitute biking in the bosque. That may sound simple until one realizes one side of my body is not working as well as the other, and I haven’t been on a bicycle in 40 or 50 years. A bit daunting. My painter neighbor loaned me her bike since she isn’t using it. She fell off it, broke her hand and had surgery in December. Even more daunting. She is quick to point out that didn’t stop her from laying down a 6’ x 12’ brick paver patio this week. “You’ve got to push yourself,” she said. “Not bad for someone in her sixties.”

Mindful of her biking experience, I wondered about my own. Could I do it? Could I do it safely? Could I do it without injuring myself? So I asked for guidance, which some people call knowing or intuition, to provide the answers. Whom did I ask? Universal Mind, Spirit, the Force, God, whatever you want to call it. How? By muscle checking for a yes or no answer to my questions. Muscle checking can be done several ways.* The body doesn’t lie. It tells the truth. I have friends whose guidance comes as goosebumps in the presence of truth, or the hair on the back of their arms standing up, a warm feeling in the chest, tingling along the neck, spine, shoulders. Signs of guidance are probably as varied as people. I have been listening to guidance for 25-30 years now. I distinguish between hearing and listening to guidance. To me, hearing it means receiving the information. It can actually come in the form of internally “hearing” an answer (clairaudience), which I have experienced. But listening to guidance not only involves receiving the information, it involves acting on it. This can require courage since it may not seem the logical thing to do. Counterintuitive at times, acting on information received can require trust or faith, at least initially, until one is confident with the validity of the process. Faith and trust can be built. Confidence comes from direct, personal experience. Start small.

Some people start with a pendulum. It can be as simple as a washer on a string or as fancy as a crystal on a chain purchased at a metaphysical bookstore. The first step is establishing the movement that determines a “yes” or “no” response. The pendulum may move north/south for a “yes” and east/west for a “no.” Ask it which is which. My response is a circle to the left for “no” and to the right for “yes.” If you are worried you are making the pendulum move by not holding it perfectly still, hang it up so you are not touching it. In either case, focus your intention on receiving a response to your question.

It can be a long way from a washer on a string to trusting your body to tell you whether or not to firewalk across coals hot enough to melt the metal poured to form the engine of your car. On different occasions, I’ve been guided to walk or not walk, and I listened (acted on the guidance) each time. My firewalk experiences were part of sacred spiritual ceremony with Unity minister Edwene Gaines. She has walked on fire countless times and was burned only once – when she didn’t listen to guidance. She received second-degree burns when she willfully decided to walk, listening to her ego rather than her guidance. She emphasized to us, “You MUST listen to your guidance, for your own safety and that of others.”

Start small. I received bike riding guidance to take my time, go slowly, stop as needed, use the street by the nature preserve with very little traffic, put my left foot (bad hip foot) on a pedal first. I received guidance I could do it safely without injuring myself. So I did. I plan to continue practicing on the street until I can realize my dream of riding on the bike path along the Rio Grande. Guidance will let me know when I’m ready. And I will listen to it.

Synchronistically, Rob Brezsny’s recent Free Will Astrology column just featured a fascinating description of an ancient form of guidance: “How did the Vikings navigate their ships through rough northern seas on cloudy and foggy days? Medieval texts speak of the mysterious ‘sunstone,’ a ‘Viking compass’ used to detect the hidden sun. Modern theories suggest that this technology may have been Iceland spar, a mineral that polarizes light, making it useful in plotting a course under overcast skies. Do you have anything like that, Libra? A navigational aid that guides your decisions when the sun’s not out, metaphorically speaking? Now would be an excellent time to enhance your connection with whatever it is that can provide such power.” I’m glad to say I do have my own navigational aid.

*(See google)

Clean Underwear Is the Mother of Invention

Do I really need to be told how to open a box? Apparently so. On the flap of the outer box for my new Keurig B70 Platinum Brewer is a 7-step instruction guide on how to open the box and extract my new single-serve coffee maker. “Turn the outer box over on its side. Pull on the plastic wrapping to free the inner box. Remove the instruction manual.” Whew. Good. I was planning on leaving the manual inside the brewer while making coffee. I’m glad I’m clear about that. I find facing the coffee maker instructions so intimidating it’s been sitting on my kitchen counter unused for several weeks now. Friends, and total strangers, have told me it’s really simple: put water in the container, put a K-Cup (a K-Cup?) in the machine, press down, and, presto-changeo, you have one cup of personally-brewed fresh coffee. Sounds good in concept. I have other priorities right now besides spending half an hour figuring out how to make myself a cup of coffee. Starbucks is nearby. And, like just about everything else in New Mexico (Baskin Robbins, Panda Express), it’s a drive through. Drive through works for me. Even if a venti latte is $4.12 now compared to my 50-cent cup of personally-brewed Keurig coffee. If I amortize the $149 the Keurig cost me at Costco over time and add that to the cost of K-Cups, it’s probably the same price as Starbucks, so why did I buy it in the first place? I decided to give up my 10-cup Cuisinart so I wouldn’t have to reheat cold coffee or refrigerate it for iced coffee later. I have a purist Virgo friend who says brewed coffee is only good for ten minutes after it’s made. She would shudder if she knew about my refrigerate-for-iced-coffee-later program. That’s why I haven’t told her.

Don’t get me started. I guess since I already am, we might as well talk about my new high-efficiency (He) washer and dryer. A 59-page instruction manual? Just for the washer? And a 36-page instruction manual for the dryer? That doesn’t even count the two additional installation booklets (23 and 44 pages respectively). I’m glad Lowe’s includes free installation. You might now suspect why they sat unused in my new home for over a month. When would I have an hour to sit down and find out how to turn them on? Oh, I know. When I ran out of clean underwear, that’s when. Remarkable, how necessity is the mother of invention. I invented some time for booklet reading when the necessity arose. (He) machines that use less water, detergent and energy and contribute to saving the planet are worthy products. Were the man (and woman) hours for booklet reading calculated and factored into the efficiency equation? Probably not. Most likely it’s enough time to develop fossil-fuel-free cars and create peace in the Middle East within the next twelve months. I’m just sayin’.

Is that the end of it? Of course not! I have a brand-new electric screwdriver to compensate for my weakening grip. I’m sure it would do a great job putting up my new kitchen paper towel holder and assembling my firewood storage rack . . . if I knew how to use it. When will necessity invent the time for me to read the booklet for that? Probably not in the foreseeable future since it doesn’t involve clean underwear.

I also bought a new Crock Pot to replace the twenty-year-old one that somehow mildewed during its year in storage. I found a way to game the system by buying the “Classic” model. “Classic” means “old” in ad speak - my kind of style. Not one computer chip in sight. Woo hoo! Just one 4-setting dial (“Low,” “High,” “Warm” and “Off”). I can deal with that. In fact, I did. The wonderful aroma of homemade beef stew filled the house with perfect timing. When I looked out my bedroom window that morning, the front garden was covered with snow – yes, in March. Stew time. There was no instruction booklet in sight – until I removed the inner stoneware container. The booklet was small, and I didn’t have to read it to make stew. I think it contained recipes. But I’m not going to confirm that. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. The Coca-Cola people got an earful when they tried to change their original formula. The public outcry was so great they had to offer their “classic” version again.

Have I morphed into a Luddite with age, a curmudgeonly older person who resists technological change? Really, why does a washing machine need thousands of permutations instead of three switches for off/on, water temperature, length of cycle? My new washer literally offers five columns with twenty-one choices, a dial with five additional choices and seven more buttons. That’s entirely too many decisions, even for clean underwear.

I’ve concluded these new, improved features are make-work projects. Perhaps part of Obama’s job creation program: technical writers for instruction manuals (those who cannot obfuscate need not apply), life coaches with appliance designations, businesses to train and certify those writers and coaches, computer repair people since almost everything comes with chips. Let your imagination run wild about additional new job applications.

While it’s fun to poke fun at technological advances, I deeply appreciate them. I’m grateful, instead of scrubbing clothes on a washboard, or rocks by a river, to have time to feed blue corn to the cranes, ducks and geese, to work in my garden then sit and stare at the cottonwood trees, to watch the green shoots of iris and hyacinth break through the soil, to visit with my neighbor over the morning-glory fence and to pet Blue, the neighborhood cat, when he deigns to honor me with his company. Contentment, for me, comes from the nurturing balance of enjoying it all.

Blurbs from the Burque:

• New items for sale at Costco: (1) Lorex Surveillance System, 2 wireless cameras, $289.99; (2) Winchester Wide Body Gun Safe. Holds 51 long guns; $799.99. 51 guns??? Any connection between the two?



• Banner sign at Rudy's Texas-style BBQ and meat market: "Real people eat meat." .....as opposed to "fake" people?

Fluorescent Yellow

Grant to Mom: “So . . . does your new walker have tennis balls on it?”
Mom to Grant: “Don’t ask. Don’t tell.”
Grant: “That means it does!”
Mom: “Fluorescent yellow.”

Our conversation then dissolved into gales of laughter. One of the things I love most about my son is his sense of humor, a warped match for mine, and the fact that nothing is sacred or off-limits. Everything is fair game for joking. And none of it is mean-spirited, just funny. We love to piggyback on each other’s comments, ramping up the interaction until everyone is laughing. Humor is a fabulous companion. It helps you get through a lot of things, letting you know this is the moment, this very moment of your life, for you to enjoy fully. No matter what the circumstances. When Grant was at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Medical Center, in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), being treated for stage-four melanoma, we enjoyed humor there.

While the nurse was checking Grant into his room, recording his responses to a list of questions on the in-room computer, she came to a question about religious preference. After a pause, Grant replied, “None,” in the presence of his former metaphysical minister mother. After another pause, I said, “What? You’re not going to own up to the Santeria and voodoo?” A laughter-filled conversation about chicken heads and blood followed as Grant, the nurse and I bonded through humor. She certainly had an insight into her new patient and his family dynamics.

Each of the six times we returned to UCLA for Grant’s week-long treatment in ICU, we found a new humorous way to greet Grant’s oncologist: “We brought him back so you could make him sick again.” “We brought him back so you could torture him some more.” “Just show me to the Lindsay Lohan suite,” Grant declared on entering when she was on the same floor for rehab.

In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Jewish psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who endured years of unspeakable horror in Nazi death camps, writes about having everything stripped away, all freedoms. All but one. He is very clear that no matter where we find ourselves, no matter what the circumstances, we always have one freedom that can never be taken away. We have the freedom to choose how we respond to our situation.

At the end of this month, I will be attending the first annual Spring Writers’ Retreat for the Albuquerque Writers Cooperative founded by Lynne C. Miller and Lisa Lenard-Cook, who publish bosque (the magazine), a literary journal. Lynn has taught writing at the college level for 36 years. Both have authored several books. Today, I must submit 10-25 manuscript pages for their review. I’m sending them a selection from The Caregiver’s Journey: Supporting Adult Children with Cancer, so my experiences in the hospital with Grant are in the forefront of my mind. And the humor that helped us survive it. Dare I say, enjoy it? It’s our one life. How do we choose to respond?

In gathering material for the book, I came across a quotation in the Living/Dying Project newsletter (winter 2011), that is central to the book and central to life: “Imagine using a life-threatening illness as an opportunity for spiritual awakening. Imagine approaching the unknown with an open heart. We often resist change as a natural part of life. Strength and healing can be found in life’s most difficult situations.”

After five days of confinement to the ICU hospital bed, Grant disconnected all the tethers holding him down, stood up, wobbled, raised his fist in the air and declared, “Power to the People.” In this spirit, we claim the quality of our life by using our power to choose our response to the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Sparkle! Time Is the Best Editor

Rev. Karen shopped at the Santa Barbara Saturday Farmers’ Market in full regalia: sparkling silver eye shadow, body glitter, silver-studded jeans and jacket, dangling jeweled beads woven into long strands of braided hair to accent her short red or blonde or brown spiked haircut. She sparkled. Not only physically, but energetically. It was hard not to notice her. A walking conversation-starter, she worked it. Her Sunday morning metaphysical talks were right-on truth – sometimes delivered in a prom dress and tiara. She knew accessories. Once when I visited her home, I saw her wardrobe room (second bedroom) filled with racks of clothes, a full hat tree and colorful feather boas.

She loved to tell stories about the impact of her appearance on the people she met. Once, at a gas station, another customer asked her if she were going to a party. “No,” she replied, “I go everywhere dressed like this.” Another of her answers to the same question was “I am the party,” which became the title of her subsequent book. Perhaps it was her Hollywood background as a Jewish therapist formerly married to Norman Fell, “Mr. Roper,” the neighbor on the T.V. show Three’s Company, that influenced her clothing choices.

My favorite Rev. Karen story, shared one Sunday morning during her sermon, described a recent plane trip she had taken. All aglitter, as usual, she sat across the aisle from a man, obviously quite taken with her (did I mention she’s also quite pretty and has a knockout figure?) After many appreciative glances her way, he worked up the courage to speak to her. Leaning conspiratorially across the aisle, he said quietly, “I like your look.” She replied, “I’m 60 years old, and I’m a minister.” As her audience laughed, she shrugged her shoulders, palms facing upward, and said, “What? It was a short flight!” to more laughter. Get to the bottom line. Cut to the chase. Tell the truth. This either works for you, or it doesn’t.

“Time is the best editor,” a favorite quotation my sister-in-law shared with me, is a less colorful way of saying the same thing. She and I, as parents of adult children with cancer, faced with our own aging, have become exquisitely aware of the precious value of time. Time to live. Time to be with those you love. Time to express your creativity. Time to spend with dear friends, in nature or traveling. A deeper appreciation of the value of time seems to arrive with age and life-threatening experiences.

A week ago my household goods and furniture arrived at my new Rio Grande bosque home in Albuquerque, NM. I have stepped into instant community. And I’m thrilled. I’ve already met a number of the neighbors. My next door neighbor, Betsy 1, has published sixteen children’s books. She is currently teaching a class on novel writing and taking two writing courses herself. Betsy 2, who lives next to her, I have not yet met. Judy, who lives in our same group of four attached adobe homes, is a painter and art teacher who taught for several years on the Navajo reservation. Her students included relatives of the famous Navajo painter, R. C. Gorman. She welcomed me the night the movers and I arrived to offer help and food, to drive me to a restaurant and to say, “Let me help you make your bed before we go to dinner. You won’t want to afterward.” Shirley is a retired elementary teacher involved with senior community theatre. Betty, who informed me today she's 93, is legally blind, and has a home health assistant four days a week. Arana is a retired therapist, a very direct communicator who knows the value of time and doesn’t mince words…or tolerate fools. She is also a musician and a gardener with 80’ long row at the nearby Los Poblanos community farm. She was very clear with me about the fact that my front porch light shined into her bedroom at night. She asked what time it would be going off. “What time do you go to bed?” I replied. She wouldn’t say, but stated she was fine with knowing my porch light would not be left on all night. “Don’t you have curtains?” I inquired. “Yes, but the light shines through.” “I want to be a good neighbor,” I said. “Likewise,” she answered. This was a cut-to-the chase conversation. Honest. Direct. When I relayed the details to Judy later, saying how much I appreciated Arana’s directness, Judy said, “That’s one of the benefits with people our age.”

Time. How do you want to spend your “one wild and precious life?”* With whom? Sparkle! Let your light shine. Cut to the chase. Be transparent in communication. Tell the truth. We don’t have forever. Time is the best editor. Why waste it?
* Poet Mary Oliver

A Temporary Necessity

“Just think of it as a temporary necessity,” the physical therapist told me as she wrote out the prescription for my front-wheeled walker. She was responding to my protest of disbelief at being provided with the accoutrements of an ailing, old lady. “That doesn’t fit my conception of myself!” But I could live with the idea of “a temporary necessity.”

Really, isn’t anything we don’t like in life a temporary necessity when we experience it? The temporary can also be a godsend. When my son, Grant, went through immunotherapy for melanoma two years ago, I stumbled across the beauty and perfection of the temporary. Doctors referred to his last-resort treatment as “going through living hell,” and they weren’t wrong. On the list of 20-30 side effects, chemical burns and blood blisters in the nose and mouth were among the more palatable ones. We also grappled with the hidden, insidious ones like depression, anxiety and hallucinations. Only by the process of going through them were we able, eventually, to identify and deal with them. When he was in despair one morning, I had him take an internet survey on depression. I had previously answered the questions the way I thought he would, and our answers matched closely. An inspired idea flowed through me from universal mind: “You know what, Grant? These are side effects of your treatment. While it may seem right now like things will always be this way, this is temporary. It will not last.” He grabbed on to the idea, allowing it to comfort him and lift his spirits. I’ve heard him tell others since that something distressing is only temporary.

“Temporary,” we get. But, “necessity?” Something needed. Hmmmmm. Why would I “need” a walker? Well, the most obvious externally discernable answer is for the painful limp due to my osteoarthritic left hip. “You’re going to need it after your hip replacement surgery, so we may as well just get it now.” It did make walking easier…along with the vicodin! But my image! My self-image does not include me with a walker. I’ve always been vital, healthy…..and…..impatient with slow, old people, whether walking or driving. “Get out of my waayyy!” Oh. Necessity. The necessity of my soul is for the expansion of empathy, love, compassion. The necessity of my soul is to be balanced, both a good giver and a good receiver, able to let in the love and support offered by others.

I’m learning, as I age, that I generate a different response from people. “Do – you – know – how – to – use – a – computer?” a hospital tech asked me, very – slowly. Instead of “Yes,” I thought of replying rapidly, inviting him to discuss with me the pros and cons of local ISPs. People respond to me differently when they see me limp across shopping center parking lots. They open doors, provide carts, offer help, are loving, patient and kind. Role models. And I have the opportunity to practice being a grateful receiver instead of the giver, a more comfortable, familiar role. Being a receiver can trigger feelings of being helpless, powerless, out of control.

A neighbor told me her independently-living, 93-year-old friend asked her, “Why are people always yelling at me?” They think you can’t hear. Why are they speaking so slowly? They think you don’t comprehend. My dear friend, Verna, an internationally-known, well-respected healer who led workshops from Dubai to Australia, howled with indignation when a long hospital stay didn’t allow her to color her hair and she was treated like an incompetent old person.

Who knew a limp and a walker could be such great spiritual teachers? One behavior I’ve altered radically is the way I interact with the truly elderly (over 80) as opposed to the newly elderly (over 60, like me!). At church recently, during greeting time, I crossed the aisle to greet a hunched-over, immobile, truly elderly woman clinging to her walker. I took her hand. I looked her in the eye. I saw her light. I let her see mine. I said, “Good Morning,” greeting her beyond the level of appearance in the place the Sufi poet Rumi referred to by saying, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.” Beyond the world of appearance and duality (right/wrong), there is a field (the unified field of oneness). I met her there. I truly saw her. “Temporary necessities,” simply put, can be great tools of transformation.

Homies and the 'Hood

The 'Hood ~ Entrance to the Glenwood community where Terranda's new home is located in the bosque near the Rio Grande Nature Center.



































































































The Crib in the 'Hood ~ Terranda's new home in the bosque.








The 'Hood ~ Sandia Mountains and bosque viewed from street adjacent to Terranda's new home







Homies ~ Canadian Geese
The 'Hood ~ Bosque neighborhood, across the street from Terranda's new home







Homies ~ Salinas Pueblo Indians
The 'Hood ~ Quarai ~ ruins of Spanish church






Homies ~ Salinas Pueblo Indians
The 'Hood ~ Abo Ruins at sunset








Homies ~ Salinas Pueblo Indians
The 'Hood ~ Community Kiva in Plaza at Gran Quarai

Ancient Cities

Abó, Quarai, Gran Quivira – even the names of these ancient pueblo cities evoke a sense of the mysterious unknown. On Saturday, I had the opportunity to visit them with the Unity Explorers on a day-long church outing. The three communities are about sixty miles southeast of Albuquerque on the other side of the Sandia and Manzano Mountains at an elevation of 6400’ (Albuquerque is 5000’ above sea level). Red sandstone walls rise up from scrub brush in the middle of nowhere at Quarai. Part of the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument, which preserves the remnants of three ancient Indian villages, these pueblos were major trade centers for centuries prior to the arrival of Spanish explorers 400 years ago. Gran Quivira was established as a national monument in 1909, making it one of the oldest sites in the National Park System.

In the distant past, New Mexico was beneath the ocean. Signs of habitatation extend back 10,000 – 12,000 years, making California’s history seem paltry by comparison. Salt taken from nearby dry salt lakes, named las salinas by the Spanish (sal is salt), was an important commodity traded between the people living in these communities and the Pueblo Indians to the west along the Rio Grande, for cotton and pottery, and the nomadic Plains Indians to the east, for bison meat and hides, crucial for their survival. In 1583, an explorer reported this area had “eleven pueblos with a great many people, over 40,000.” Until recently, I thought Pueblo Indians were a tribe rather than a group of tribes named after their style housing. Now I know “Pueblo” includes the Sandia Pueblo, Isleta Pueblo, Acoma Pueblo, Santa Ana Pueblo and many others with their own individual cultural traditions and languages.

What intrigues me about the Salinas Pueblo people is how we currently find ourselves in the same situation they did when their circumstances forced them to change or perish. The French have a saying, “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.”* “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” I’m also reminded those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it. It is ironic to me to see how the people of the Salinas Pueblo Missions were faced then with the same choices we face today. There’s only one. When we look beneath the surface, we discover how we are the same.

Gran Quivira’s 800-year history is layered and complex. The people lived on the edge of survival, far from other pueblos and in a town with no permanent water source nearby. They learned to adapt to their environment by hollowing out shallow basins in the ground to catch the runoff of sporadic rains to supplement their wells and roof-fed cisterns. They had a flexible diet that included seasonal wild foods such as piñon nuts, yucca, prickly pears, jackrabbits, deer, pronghorns and bison. Salt from the nearby lakes preserved game meat. They cultivated drought-resistant varieties of corn, beans and squash using dryland farming techniques. Historical documents indicate that drought was one of the leading factors in the abandonment of the pueblo in 1672. When the rains stopped falling in the 1660s, the water-poor pueblo was in mortal danger. Famine quickly followed the drought. A mass grave, for 480 people who starved to death in a single winter, was found. The Franciscans transferred tons of grain, beans and livestock from other missions in armed convoys, but bad roads, Apache raiders and sheer distance made it impossible to feed the Salinas missions. Crops failed year after year. In 1670 the people fled to Abó. Theirs was the first pueblo to move. Within seven years, all three communities were abandoned for the still-flowing waters of the Rio Grande south and west of the mountains. In 1669, Friar Juan Bernal wrote, “For three years no crop has been harvested. In the past year, a great many Indians perished of hunger, lying dead along the roads, in the ravines and in their huts.”

So, why did some of these resilient people, who were able to adapt to so many changes, not change soon enough, not move soon enough, to survive? Some did. Their descendents, now living in the Isleta Pueblo, still speak their Tiwa language. Famine from three years of no harvested crops, and they still did not move to neighboring pueblos? These were people who preserved their cultural heritage by establishing hidden kivas, or ceremonial rooms, in their pueblos when the friars changed church policy and vigorously suppressed native religious practices. People who rebuilt their pueblo of concentric circles surrounding the grand kiva with a square-room pueblo atop earlier construction, who adopted cremation over earlier flexed-position burial practices, who evolved from living in partially-underground pit houses, to jacals of woven wicker walls plastered with mud, to above-ground stone pueblos. Their challenges were not so different from ours today. The “Living” section of yesterday’s Albuquerque Journal featured changing climate zone maps showing new cultivation zones for plants due to higher temperatures. The cover story of Discover magazine (December 2011) is “Water Wars: The Coming Battle Over Earth’s Most Precious Resource.”

Change is uncomfortable. Releasing the familiar and known is difficult. Venturing forth into the unknown is challenging, both individually and collectively. Letting go of what no longer works, to discover what does, requires courage. Both historically and currently that proves to be so. That is what we are facing now. Will we survive, thrive, or not? Who will? Will you? The third year of the famine is here.
*Alphonse Karr, Les Guêpes 1849