i've been enjoying our beautiful place mats from san which arrived saturday. her work is so lovely, the stitches so fine and sure. (sewing skills are not my forté - my machine always ends up eating all the bobbin stitches so that i end up with a matted mess which is why i'm often in awe of people's skills with a machine - and with a needle as i always manage to prick myself and so relate to the expression "all thumbs.")
(thank you san!)
i've also been eating many slices of whole wheat flax seed banana bread from the new cafe in the neighborhood . . some furry little creature is also very interested in it . .
in braiding sweetgrass i'm reading the chapter about franz dolp, an oregon resident who began a project of planting an old growth forest on a patch of logged out timberland in the oregon coast range. his home in the midst of this forest is now part of the spring creek project for nature, hosted by oregon state university, corvallis:
. . his ambitions ranged beyond physical restoration. as franz wrote, 'it is important to engage in restoration with development of a personal relationship with the land and its living things.' in working with the land, he wrote of the loving relationship that grew between them: 'it was as if i discovered a lost part of myself.'
(from page 285)
kimmerer goes into depth with the intricacies of the relationship between soil, sun, roots, leaves and water to once again nourish the land into a renewable existence, after it has been stripped bare by the logging industry:
industrial forestry, resource extraction, and other aspects of human sprawl are like salmonberry thickets--swallowing up land, reducing biodiversity and simplifying ecosystems at the demand of societies always bent on having more. in five hundred years we exterminated old-growth cultures and old-growth ecosystems, replacing them with opportunistic culture. pioneer human communities, just like pioneer plant communities, have an important role in regeneration but they are not sustainable in the long run. when they reach the edge of easy energy, balance and renewal are the only way forward, wherein there is a reciprocal cycle between early and late successional systems, each opening the door for the other.
the old growth forest is as stunning in its elegance of function as in its beauty. under conditions of scarcity, there can be no frenzy of uncontrolled growth or waste of resources. the "green architecture" of the forest structure itself is a model of efficiency, with layers of foliage in a multilayered canopy that optimizes capture of solar energy. if we are looking for models of self-sustaining communities, we need look no further than an old-growth forest. or the old-growth cultures they raised in symbiosis with them.
(from page 284)
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meanwhile, chanda came home this evening suddenly motivated to sort through the many (many!) board games (very dusty!) piled on the top shelf of her bookcase. subsequently we have a very large pile for the salvation army, and a smaller pile that will stay with us with a few things i thought kendall might like. i actually had a plastic bin of cut out paper games from the click/ladybug magazines the girls received for years, each game in its own envelope. i'm surprised at how organized i was.
in the midst of the mess, pluto found a colorful strand of metropolitan museum visitor pins which he happily hopped into the living room with.
