EcoBliss: Keeping a Weather Journal, More Important than You Think

Walking further than I normally would want to,
we happened upon this lovely fern forest.

Listening to: This song, I think, exemplifies how many people feel about "bad" weather.

Today's Bliss Formula: I am luxuriating in the time with my frog today. And in the fact that we have no more trips scheduled at all for the rest of the summer. The only "trip" I want to take is a regular jaunt down to our peninsula's beaches. And a walk to our backyard to sit on our plaid blanket and wait for birds.

As I mentioned yesterday, the best part of our trip this past weekend was the walking. Lots of walks. And the best walk was into the woods. There are patches of old growth forest here and you can feel there is age and wisdom amongst these trees.

During one of our walks, it was starting to rain. This normally would send me running for cover, shrieking even while I do so. Yes, I am a princess. And though my hair is not cotton candy puffy in any way whatsoever and I don't wear makeup or high heels or silk, I think I may melt. I'm not convinced that I won't, anyway.

But this time, Frog pointed out to me that the woods were like an umbrella and I took enough of a breath to realize that she was speaking the truth. So instead of running and most likely slipping and falling, I relaxed and enjoyed myself.

I've had this thing with the weather. I think it's because my father, who if the weather weren't to his liking in some specific way, spent a good deal of time swearing at it. I picked up the habit, sadly.

But being car free has gone a long way to changing my tune.

Also, being depression free has helped. And I think that is a key to this puzzle for many people.

We tend to use the weather as a mirror for our own emotions. So if we feel at all bad and wake up to a gray sky, we blame the weather for our mood. When really, the feeling about the weather is coming from the mood.

How I judge the weather -- as either "good" or "bad" or "pretty" -- has everything to do with my own internal landscape at that moment.

The weather is not out to get you.

The weather, really, has nothing to do with you.

Be grateful for the rain; most parts of this country are suffering from drought.

Be grateful for the four feet of snow; precipitation is precipitation and four feet of snow sometimes closes things down. We used to love that when we were little.

Let me also discourage people from seeing the weather as somehow our "fault." Yes, there is something going on in terms of climate change. There is no denying that. (Well, there is, but if your last name isn't Bush, you probably put some stock in real science.)

But...regardless of climate change, you can't change the fact of the rain. You can't blame climate change for earthquakes. Big hurricanes have always happened. Tsunamis have always happened. Stuff has always happened.

If you're that worried about the weather, stop driving.

Now, I have proof about this weather thing not really being a big deal: I keep a weather journal. So when people say things to me like "GOD! This spring is so COLD!" I can say, "Well, actually, last year about two days different from today, it was the same temperature." (What a pain in the arse I am!)

Or the classic in my neck of the woods is surprise at "late" snow. But I can document that we almost always get a bit of wet snow once the forsythia are completely yellow.

My weather journal has taught me about cycles and consistency. It has taught me, for example, no matter what we like to tell ourselves, that each season really is just about the same length of time.

It has taught me about the Buddhist concept of no attachment and no aversion. The weather simply is. Like much of life simply is.

It has taught me to pay attention to the rhythms of the season and thus to my own rhythms. For example, during the hottest parts of summer, I am not likely to do daily yoga and I am more likely to nap. This is just part of my own personal cycle.

So, try this. I am a regular journal writer -- and you should be too if you are in any way a seeker -- so at the top of each journal entry, I write "Planet," and under that I write a brief description of the weather, and if it is the growing season, I track what's happening in our yard or with the trees.

This is an awesome and powerful way to feel more connected to your life and your community. When you notice each tree, each flower, each bird, you feel responsible for their well being as well as your own.

If anything, when you look back and compare the "Planet" section to the rest of your journal, you might start to notice how much you blame the external weather for your internal weather, and maybe, eventually, you'll stop.

That's when you'll know that true change is in the air.

EcoBliss: Car Rental Crazies & My Aching...

From our strawberry patch.

Listening to: Driving makes me feel like this.

Today's Bliss Formula: We were at a record high yesterday of 93 degrees, so this morning's 68 feels fabulous, and the plants are loving the rain we've gotten. It's nice not to be surrounded by sounds of fans.

As I've talked about here and here and here, we are car free but we do rent periodically to visit out of town family. Over the seven years we have been car free, we have managed to keep rentals below ten a year, sometimes around 6 or 8. No more, as I mentioned in yesterday's post, the new goal is 3.

When we first went car free, the rental weekend was a much anticipated time. I would get excited to be running around. (Not my partner, no, Frog has never been excited about cars.)

But I noticed, as time passed, that that excitement turned more and more into anxiety. After running around for more than a couple of hours, I would be completely outside myself. Off balance. Out of my center. Overstimulated and totally grouchy.

And now it takes days for me to recover -- both mentally and physically.

You may think I'm exaggerating, but I wonder how many problems of sleeplessness and depression and aching backs could be resolved if people would just stop driving, just stop moving at such unnatural speeds.

Because, you see, the problems around cars go far beyond the use of resources and the varieties of pollution (air and noise and water...) and the displacement of wild areas and their inhabitants. Far beyond.

Cars have created, just to start, a society without sidewalks. Think what that means. And if there are sidewalks, is there anyone walking on them?

Cars created suburbs, which creates sprawl and traffic and one hour one-way commutes and dead city centers and dead cultural centers.

Cars create speed and anger and impatience.

Cars are certainly culpable in our obesity epidemic but no one bothers to point that finger.

If you are an average American, and there is a good chance you are, did you know you get in and out of your car an average of ten times a day? That statistic is ten years old, by the way, and I can assure you, it is low.

So how do you feel in your car?

Are you spending a lot of time sighing, holding your breath, yelling, swearing? Be truthful.

Do you feel attacked and inconvenienced and personally affronted by the other cars?

Do you take it all personally?

Do you feel like driving is a competition?

I notice more and more of this each time I drive after not driving.

I also notice that I feel like crap, physically, after being in the car for even short bursts of time. This weekend we drove four hours and halfway there I noticed my right arm was asleep thanks to a pinched nerve in my shoulder thanks to the design of the headrest that forces our heads slightly forward on our spines.

My lower back hurt. My right hip ached. And when we got out of the car at a rest stop, I noticed a number of people having to carefully exit their cars and then stand and wait and then slowly start walking, working out their constricted muscles.

Hmmm...I wonder how well we all slept that night?

And what if you do this every day? What about repetitive stress injuries? Our bodies are made to move. We are designed, physiologically, to walk and stretch -- not to be confined.

And I wonder about the air we are breathing in our cars.

So there is the stress on the muscular and skeletal body, the stress on our hearts (due to the panic and anxiety and anger), the stress on our immune systems (again, panic and anger), the stress on our lungs (the bad air, the holding of breath, the constricted breathing).

(For a paper by two Phd psychologists, go here.)

And then there is the stress on our minds. The speed. The anticipation. The primal fear responses. As I mentioned yesterday, the awful combination of over-stimulation and boredom. The ever increasing need for this kind of stimulation all the time.

The need for speed.

No wonder we toss and turn in bed. No wonder our minds are racing, monkey minds that cannot handle even a moment of down time.

No wonder we are becoming a species of angry, self-important, competitive, unhealthy, fat, impatient animals.

We want everything right now. Fast. We want everything. We don't want to pay for it. It better be cheap. I don't have to change -- someone else will figure out how to keep me living like this.

We are committed to this misery. How many of us can truly claim happiness -- the kind that comes from deep inside and does not depend at all on having or being anything other than what we have and are?

It has to stop. This madness. But it seems it won't. Even my friends who claim to care, don't stop. Then there are those who can't even see the problem because they are so busy moving so fast. Hamsters on giant wheels.

So this is what renting makes me feel like. This is what renting a car makes me think about.

For me, cars and bliss just don't go together.

InnerBliss: Knowing your Balance

A church near the Columbus Arts Festival.

Listening to: Pop influenced medieval chant -- the structure of chant is soothing.

Today's Bliss Formula: Where are my sparkling red shoes? Cause there's no place like home.

Let me seek, then, the gift of silence, and poverty,
and solitude, where everything I touch
is turned into a prayer: where the sky is my prayer,
the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer,
for God is all in all.

Thomas Merton. Thoughts in Solitude

For three days now, we've had a car so that we could go visit my niece in Columbus. She's almost eight and she's funny and sweet and wonderful and beautiful -- of course.

But we barely know each other. Thanks to this culture that separates families -- for things like jobs and possessions. There simply is no making up for not living within a mile or two of one another. That day to day contact in small, frequent doses cannot be made up for in intense, all-at-once sorts of visits. Even if you visit often, it's not the same as being close enough for an impromptu picnic or dinner or just time at the lake.

It's not the same because it's completely out of balance. It starts and ends with drives on dangerous roads that are boring and overstimulating at the same time. (I will write more tomorrow about driving and how, yes, it's horrible for this planet but it is so horrible for our bodies and minds -- something we don't even think about.)

It's out of balance because it throws people out of their normal routines -- and people need these routines. And we should be part of each other's routines -- not outside of them. By the time I get to my niece's house, I'm already tired, so she'll never know what I'm really like because she gets this worn out version.

My niece will never live near me. That is a fact. So she will grow up to know strangers better than any family. She will grow up yet another generation of humans disconnected, always on the run to the next better place, the next better job, never thinking that what she has is enough.

No real roots. And roots matter. As I have mentioned here before, if you have a tap root, as a tree, you can withstand any storms. If you have shallow roots, a small storm can blow you over.

I am thinking about all of this, because I do every time we go for a visit, and because on our way there and back, a Great Blue Heron kept flying over us. We felt he was our traveling companion, and as a totem animal, he has much to say about these very same issues.

Herons are of water and land, earth and sky. They stand on one leg. They are all about balance and inner knowing.

So I felt this heron was reminding me that I know what my balance is and I must live it. That I cannot deny or ignore my need for balance out of some desire to do what people expect.

Herons are independent in this way. They are not afraid to be different, so why are we, why am I? We are so concerned about not judging, about being politically correct, about not offending.

But guess what? There are choices being made in this world that stink -- they stink for the individual and the community at large. And I think it's time that those of us who can see this, stop hiding it from those who can't.

We are wasteful and greedy and we make choices based on some false need for security rather than making choices out of love.

We claim Christianity or Hinduism and we claim to be followers of Christ or Buddha or whomever, and yet none of those people would live like us. None of those people would make the choices so many of us are making every single day. Like working for money instead of joy; like being so busy that our spiritual lives get a couple of hours a month.

Our culture is sick and in need of some serious care.

So, we will return that car in a couple of hours. And we've decided no more ten times a year rentals but instead a maximum of three.

And this evening, I'm going to go sit in my neighbors' backyard. I'll walk over in my bare feet so I can feel my roots sinking back into this earth. And this weekend, this little family that we have right around us will perhaps gather around a fire and share stories and bask in the love that is the routine of each other.

How are you helping to cure this sickness? Are you suffering from any symptoms that you could work on yourself?

EcoBliss: Walkin', A Terrible Way to Travel

A picture taken on a cemetery walk.

Listening to right now: Lila Downs, Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps

Today's Happiness Formula: Later today, we get to go to our neighbors' to drink wine, eat cheese, and embarrass their daughter as she leaves for her prom. Doesn't get better than that!

Following My Bliss By: Continue working on nonfiction. Journal. Read that great book I mentioned yesterday. Make lists (oh, how I adore making lists!).

I took a long walk to the cemetery during some exceptional spring weather to take some photos, in particular to photograph the trees which were bursting in pink-osity. When I got there, I realized all too late that I had managed to drink too much water before I left!

You can imagine, I took photos fast that day. And during the whole walk home, I was cursing myself for not having ridden my bike. A much faster mode of transportation when there are not public bathrooms to be found.

But slow was my point that day. And even a bike can be too fast once you get used to really witnessing this life you are living rather than speeding by it in a car.

Above all, do not lost your desire to walk.
Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being
and walk away from every illness; I have walked
myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no
thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it."

--Soren Kierkegaard

My favorite walking story:

We were on the bus because we had to go the mall area for some god forsaken reason. (And a mall area truly fits the definition of "god forsaken," don't you agree?)

It was summer but where the mall is located is a bit too dangerous for my biking tastes. And there aren't sidewalks for walking.

But some people had braved all of this and were walking toward where our bus was waiting for the light to change.

A large woman who looked rooted right into her seat, leaned into the person next to her and said:

"Walkin'." She shook her head and paused dramatically. "Now that's a terrible way to travel."

I almost peed myself (and I hadn't had an excess of water that day).

But that story is sad, too. She may have been a stereotypical bus rider in these parts (where bus riders tend toward the lower socio-economic levels), but I think most people -- regardless of socio-economic status -- would have nodded in agreement with her.

Walking. It's slow. If it's hot, you might get sweaty! Gasp! If it's raining, you might get wet. If it's snowing, you might get cold.

Yes, that's right, when you walk...you might actually experience the weather!

I can thank walking, actually, for my new love of winter. Winter was a season I detested. Besides the snow sitting on Christmas lights, I had no use for winter. But then I started walking in those storms and after those storms. When most people stay inside. When there are barely any cars on the road.

The peace of it. Walking taught me there are different kinds of silence and the one after a snow storm is heavy and complete.

Do not lost your desire to walk...

How many problems have I solved walking? How many story ideas have I gotten? I have plotted entire novels on walks. When I start my day with an early morning walk, all goes well. When I take the time to remember to go for a walk in the middle of the day, it slows me down just enough to remember my priorities for the rest of the day.

Perhaps the truth depends
on a walk around the lake.

--Wallace Stevens

We are built for walking, we humans. We are built for moving around, feeling life through our physical shells.

So what is happening to us as we sit inside metal shells for so much of the day?

Take a walk today and see what comes of it. Go by yourself. Walking with someone is a wonderful way to connect to another but this walking is about connecting to yourself.

I stroll along serenely,
with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything.

--Pablo Neruda

EcoBliss: Urban Living is Smart Living

First buds on dwarf apple tree.

Listening to right now: Paolo Conte

Today's Happiness Formula: The sound of Italian first thing in the morning! Waking with books in my head. Waking and feeling truly awake (thanks to obeying my wheat allergy).

Following My Bliss by: Today I'll ride my bike to my chiropractor and then to get wine to go with homemade corn tortillas tonight. Yum. A friend is coming this morning to pick up the incorporation papers for an adult creativity center we are in the process of opening. Later, I will finish writing a grant and doing edits on my partner's novel.

We live on one-tenth of an acre in the city. We are in a zone 6b (for you gardening nerds) that acts a lot like a zone 7. We are in a clean watershed. Our bio-region is diverse, to say the least.

And right here, in this tiny yard, there is so much going on:

We have been eating asparagus for about three weeks already.

There is edible kale -- it overwintered -- and there are baby kales, chard, dandelion, greens of all sorts coming up.

Our kiwi vines -- yes, kiwi, there is a hardy variety -- are trailing and filling out the front arbor. I can already see buds aplenty.

Our grape vines are robust.

Our dwarf apple that we planted two summers ago has its first flowers. Perhaps we will eat an apple this fall from our own yard.

Our almond tree is healthy -- for now. Almonds in California are being plagued by an unknown disease and I fear for ours.

Our strawberries are covered in flowers and we will eat strawberries into the fall -- and this is only their third summer here.

This is all in a yard that has a ton of flowers. Besides being good for bees and birds and butterflies, they are good for my eyes. And we still have too much grass -- which in my book means we have grass. I would like to not have any and someday we will accomplish that goal. For now, we mow with a reel mower.

For every vegetable or fruit we eat out of our own yard, we are decreasing our footprint on this small planet.

I won't go on and on about the evils of sprawl. Here's a place you can read about that. But from what I have observed about people who live out in the country, they spend a lot of their time driving into cities. Everything they do takes more resources. Think about how much more fuel it takes to get them their groceries alone. Add to this the fact that they most often do not work any where near their homes. They are constantly commuting.

City living can be the more relaxing option -- if you approach it intentionally and mindfully.

We don't have to have a car. Which you know by now. At the very least, could you get rid of one of your cars? (It is pretty safe to assume in this country that if you have two adults in your household, you have two cars.)

There's no public transportation out in the country. There's barely any in the suburbs.

We live within a 3 mile radius of absolutely everything we need. Think about that. It's all walkable! We don't have to drive for anything -- we can walk to our food, our entertainment, our work.

And if more people opted out of cars and into bikes, walking, and public transportation, imagine how much more wonderful and human-friendly city-living could become.

We could remove driveways and add gardens! We could make kid-dense areas car free. There are parts of London where you can't drive a car. Downtown Freiberg, Germany is car free.

Living off the grid might sound ideal, but grids work because they are efficient in that they serve many, many people. What we suck into the grid is where the change can -- and needs to -- happen. The grid itself is not the problem.

We are part of a community. Some of our best friends live within the houses right around us. That is worth something -- especially if you believe times might become increasingly difficult.

We are two people living in 900 square feet (small here, but large in most parts of the world) on one tenth of an acre. We could be two people living on 10, 20, 100 acres, and that is not justifiable unless you are a farmer.

And being a farmer is something most of us could not handle, no matter how much we like to romanticize it. Most of us can't grow a decent tomato. Let's just start where we are, shall we? Like with salad greens -- you don't even need a garden bed; a pot will do for salad greens!

Does gardening and producing your own food on a small piece of land sound like too much work? Because it's small, the gardening is dense, which means less weeding. And because we aren't driving around all the time trying to fulfill needs or get to jobs, we have a lot of free time.

Because this is about quality of life, above all else. We live cheaper and easier and so we don't need to work as much and can concentrate on our writing and our art and our friendships and having fun.

Imagine that.

EcoBliss: Joyful Car-Free Living, Part 2

My newest bike, barely a year old, Holly GoLightly.
(A Giant like Genevieve.)

Listening to right now: Amelie Soundtrack

Today's Happiness Formula: Rediscovering music that is transcendent and makes me feel filled and slightly floaty at the same time.

Relevant-to-this-Post Headline: I've been told that our Erie Mayor will be announcing a bike-to-work week, which will take place May 12th to the 18th. Details about other activities will be forthcoming!

After deciding that giving up our car for a year's experiment was a go, I looked at everything we did on a regular basis and figured out how to do it without a car.

The only thing I could not get to without a car was cat litter. Yes, cat litter! We went through a lot of it, having multiple cats, and the bags were too big and heavy for a bus ride.

So I looked into the idea of an occasional car rental, which turned out to be very cheap on weekends through Enterprise. (And they are not paying me to say this!)

That was that. Fast forward seven years and we rent very little. Perhaps 8 weekends a year. Holidays, family out of town visits -- that sort of thing.

Now, if you have children, your first line of defense for you car will be them, so I direct you to a blog about a family living car free.

But WHY do this, you may still be asking, so here's the list, and it's certainly not exhaustive:

**It slows you down to a more human pace of life. Were we meant to go 70 miles an hour? When I look at the anger on people's faces in their cars, I know the answer is "no."
**It's great for your overall health. No more gym. No more stress. Driving, now that I don't do it all the time I can notice this, driving really shoots adrenaline into your system. It's a trying-to-survive thing.
**You notice things about where you live that you would have never noticed in a car. And you'll feel more invested in where you live because of this.
**You won't spend as much. The average car -- and this is an 8 year old stat from a book by Katie Alvord -- costs 5 to 7 thousand a year. And every time you think of some little thing you "need," it's so easy to jump in the car and get it -- no more.
**You won't be running around all the time. Whenever we do rent, we run some errands, and I think about how people do this kind of running almost daily. Two days of it every couple of months almost drives me batty.
**You'll have more time to do what really matters. Since you won't be running around so much and since you'll have more disposable income and maybe can cut back on work that you don't like (if that's the case), you can spend quiet time with your family, plant a vegetable garden, read poetry, paint a masterpiece -- listen to your heart's yearnings.
**Be European wherever you are! Living without a car makes me feel like I live in a village. And when I have flowers in my front basket and fresh produce in my back basket, I can imagine I live in one of those very Miss Marple towns (but without the murder, thank you!).

Nothing simplifies your life like getting rid of your car.

And now the harder stuff (you knew it was coming):

**We are at war for oil. Period. Wars are always about resources. And this war will turn into more wars, if we don't figure this out.
**This problem is one of demand and not one of supply, as we are treating it. We must take responsibility for this war every time we fill our gas tanks and it doesn't matter how you vote -- if you drive every single day by yourself in a car when there are other options. We can find other "fuels" but in fifty years we will discover the error of our ways yet again. Nothing is perfect. Every fuel comes at a price.
**We subsidize our addiction by taking away from some of the solutions. Our roadways, our gas prices, our car manufacturers -- all of them take government subsidy money away from railways and buses, more efficient forms of transportation, bike paths, and on and on.
**The problem does not stop at fuel: the manufacture and subsequent disposal of that car wears on the environment in a larger way than the extraction of the fuel that goes into it.
**This list will not go into the details of all the death: human, animal, and otherwise.

Al Gore called the truth of all of this "Inconvenient," and yes, for many people, that is how simple it is, and so they continue to choose convenience.

But there is so much more to this issue that has to do with the beauty of our humanity...

the connections to nature that we are missing...

the infinite power of our imaginations that we are denying every time we take the easy way...

the lives that we are missing and exchanging for speed and consumption.

EcoBliss: Joyful Car-Free Living

My Bike, Genevieve, at a park near our home.

Listening to right now: Revista do Samba

Today's Happiness Formula: Another "yes" in my inbox to a request for an interview; I am overwhelmed by people's positive responses to this idea.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.
Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish.
Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
--Iris Murdoch, 1965

"Where to start?" I always ask myself when I'm thinking about telling someone about our car free lifestyle and what it means to us.

At the beginning.

When we still had a Paris-quality patisserie in this town, whose walls were sunshine yellow and whose owners always smiled and whose pastries, well, they could almost make you believe you had died and this was definitely heaven.

I had a partially eaten chocolate croissant on the table. Partially eaten, that is how used to this heaven I was. A cup of perfectly not-over-roasted coffee at the right hand corner of my journal.

In which I was scribbling, furiously. I was writing a list suggested by Julia Cameron's Right to Write.

And that was when an impossible sentence spilled from my pen: We could get rid of our car.

We could get rid of our car, it whispered, and you could have more time to write and she could have more time to paint and...

I looked up to see if the world had stopped spinning.

And this seems like hyperbole, but in this culture, really, is it?

For my partner, the thought of not having a car was instantly do-able. For me, I was much more attached to being able to get around quickly.

And I was a bit lazy. Admit it, that is part of the issue. Cars are so easy.

And we don't live in Boston or Chicago or any such place. I have lived in Chicago; I have experienced real public transportation.

The public transportation in a small city like ours can be...startling.

In order to get myself to do it, to make the leap, I made a deal with myself: this was a one year experiment. You can do anything for one year. Right?

We handed in our car at the end of July in 2001.

We have (barely) looked back. Yes, every spring, after a winter of partaking of very poor buses that only run every 45 minutes, every spring, I get the urge, I lust after a car.

Just a small one, I say, as my mouth waters like the post-diet, starved-for-chocolate, about-to-fall-off-the-wagon woman we have all been at one time or another.

Every year, this wandering eye lasts shorter and shorter amounts of time. The first few years, I could go a month or two comparing and contrasting all the possibilities. This spring, about a month ago, my lust was down to a few days.

Because our life is good.

Really good.

Without a car. With the occasional rental.

This choice was made for all the right reasons -- quality of life reasons -- and those override lust every time.

How do we do it? What does the day to day look like?

Tomorrow, we'll get into the nitty gritty.

For now, just try to imagine it. And if you can, imagine it with a chocolate croissant at your side, yellow walls promising summer around you, and make some lists -- lists about how you could slow down, spend less, and savor more.