Ok, it's been awhile...a year and a half? Might be the longest I've gone between posts. Sorry! I will try to start updating again more often ... but no promises. I'm planning to clean my room today though, and in the spirit both of settling in and procrastinating, a blog update seemed like a good idea.

Obviously a lot has happened since my last post ... I did indeed spend time in far southern Israel at Kibbutz Lotan for their Green Apprenticeship permaculture program and a couple months after for volunteering ... finished my year in Israel with Dorot, spent the summer at Camp Wise again, this time as Head of Trips and Teva ... and then spent the fall at the Isabella Freedman Center in CT working as a Jewish environmental educator with the Teva Learning Center. Then I spent a few months back at Schweitzer Mountain in Idaho, working a second season as a ski instructor. It was all really great!

I also met an incredible girl named Abby. We've been together for a bit over a year now, and it's going swell. So that's another thing that happened.

What else has happened and where am I now? Follow the jump!


Ok. So.

I live in a really awesome beautiful farmhouse in Reisterstown, MD.

Sounds kind of random, I know. It isn't as much as you might think.

As I drew towards the end of fall Teva, I started thinking about where to be next. I had calculated, not long before then, that since graduating college in 2006, I had moved an average of once every four months. Yep, every four months. Not as often as some, sure, but still quite often I think, and this went on for a good four years. I've never actually been the type of person who gets antsy being in one place for too long and must move or go crazy. I actually like staying in one place (I think...it sounds nice anyway). It's just that for all the places I have wanted to spend time in, the work I've wanted to be doing, and communities I've been looking for, I've had to move around a lot. But it was wearing on me, and I was really looking for something that would allow me a bit more stability and settled-ness.

Enter: Kayam Farm, a Jewish educational farm based at the Pearlstone Conference and Retreat Center. I had come across Kayam a couple times in my online research of what existed in the Jewish environmental world, and had started seriously considering spending time here back last summer, especially as there was a chance I would be spending a year in Rwanda working at a youth village as their main farm guy, and I wanted to boost up my farm experience. (I did not end up going to Rwanda, for a lot of reasons. Yes, I would really still like to go for a shorter visit, but I feel really good about that decision)

So, long story short, I started talking to folks at Kayam, including the director, and through framing my background in the right way and continuously expressing my huge desire to be at Kayam and make it happen however I could, managed to get hired to replace the outgoing Education Director, Casey Yurow. I moved out here in March, spend the spring working with Casey, learning the ropes and transitioning, and then assumed his position when Casey left in June.

So now, I've been in this new role for just over a month. It's been wonderful, challenging, inspiring and generally awesome. I've been metaphorically shuffling and re-organizing things in my head, digitially re-organizing things on the server so that they make sense to my brain, and physically re-organizing both the office itself, and have also moved rooms in the farmhouse. This afternoon I'll make the final push (for now) to really get myself moved in. I've kind of been procrastinating on that one (I'm sure that's really surprising).

We have a great group of Kayam Summer Fellows working with us on the farm at at neighboring JCC Camp Milldale. I've been given the opportunity to work with them as their educational mentor, observing and giving feedback on their lessons at camp and helping them develop and grow as educators, and am excited to see this continue through the summer. Our Kayam Summer Kollel is off to a flourishing and invigorating start (see their blog Here) and there are some exciting programs coming up.

And, I'm gonna be here for at least another year. No moving again for quite some time. That's exciting. And Abby lives in DC, less than 1.5 hrs away. Yes!

Hopefully, another post soon. Thanks for reading!

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Headin' down South

It's late and I must be up early tomorrow so this will be a short post...but to update briefly on my life: tomorrow morning I leave Jerusalem and head down south to Kibbutz Lotan where I will be starting their Green Apprenticeship program. I'm very excited! For many reasons. While I've had some wonderful experience teaching environmental education and had the chance to boost my ecology background and live in some phenomenally gorgeous places, I've always felt the lack of agricultural experience, from your basic gardening to more advanced farming. This will be a really great opportunity for both classroom and hands on experiential learning about the techniques and practices of permaculture - sustainable agriculture, gardening, building techniques, etc.

I'm also excited to be getting out of the city to the desert, with fresh air, clear skies and what I'm anticipating will be many many star-filled nights. Orion has been a constant companion of mine, from Jerusalem back to Idaho over break and back here again. I'm looking forward to seeing more of the stars surrounding my favorite constellation!

I really have enjoyed living in JLem for the past six months, I've made some really great friends and love the community feeling that's here...but, not surprisingly, I'm not big on the city life, and some quieter time spent in the desert will be wonderful. It should also help me progress further in answering the question of what, exactly, my connection is to the land of Israel...one that I've found difficult to answer while living in the city, where connections to the land are indirect, to say the least. Obviously we as Jews have this ancient connection to this land...one of my goals for this year is to determine what my personal connection is -- what are it's parameters, how deep does it run -- essentially, to develop and define my sense of place for this place. Like I've mentioned, I've lived in some incredible places in the world, where finding that sense of place is, in a sense, a little bit easier.

Perhaps going to the desert, where so much of our history as Jews has taken place. The desert, where some of our most formative experiences have happened.

On that note, more to come...

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Seeing as my last post is both a) a long time past and b) not the most upbeat post, I thought I'd take a quick moment before the shabbas to post a few pics from my recent vacation skiing at home with fam and friends at Schweitzer Mtn in North Idaho.

I also have many many pics from my Dorot seminar in Budapest and weekend in Vienna before flying home...but those (and the accompanying thoughts) will have to wait for another entry.

In brief though, being home was FANTASTIC. I came to the newly-refreshed realization that, while I certainly enjoy doing many things, there is nothing that makes me as happy as when I'm skiing. Nothing. The fresh mountain air, the feeling of bobbing and weaving through knee deep (or deeper) powder, floating up as a fluffy burst of snowy deliciousness hits you in the face before you sink into the next beautiful turn. There's nothing else like it in the world. Not for me at least.

I'm totally happy to be back in Israel, and delighted to see my friends here again...but it sure was hard to leave the mountains!

See the following pics to understand why :-)










pics:
1) My parents' home in Spokane, WA
2) My poor buried car (Subaru)
3) On its way to freedom
4) View from our condo on Schweitzer Mtn, Idaho
5) View from the top of Schweitzer - that's Lake Pend O'Reille in the valley
6) The fam at the top of Schweitzer
7) Dad and sister Shayna with the Selkirk mtns and crazy clouds in the background

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"This isn't what we meant."

Last week, I spent two days in Bethlehem on a program with Encounter, which provides brief experiences for Jewish leaders in Bethlehem, Hebron and East Jerusalem. As it was quite an interesting, thought-provoking experience, I've been meaning to write a lengthy post on my experience for the past week, but being crazy busy haven't found time for an adequate update. But, since I'm leaving early tomorrow morning for a visit with sister Shayna to Beirut (!!) I'll share a few thoughts generated by the experience before I finish packing and prepping tonight.

First off, Encounter is not meant to be a "dialogue" program, in that rather than coming together with Palestinians to discuss thoughts and perspectives from both sides of the issue, the goal is to meet and listen to Palestinians living in Bethlehem, and see a (granted, tiny) slice of the Palestinian experience. In essence, to have an Encounter.
(Elliot and I with our gracious host, Osama)

Bethlehem is mainly a Christian city. As such, nearly all the Palestinians we met are Christian. On the one hand, this is certainly a narrow and limiting perspective on the issue, since most Palestinians are of course Muslim, and there are undeniably religious components to the conflict. That said, listening to the perspectives of life in a Christian Palestinian town - where ties to the Palestinian issue are cultural and ethnic, but not religious per se - underscored that as much as the conflict has roots in religious conflict, it also a conflict of nationalist identity on both sides. On the Palestinian side, it is greatly about the desire for channeling nationalist Palestinian identity into a tangible, physical state. On the Jewish/Israeli side, occupation and the inherent problems stem not only from religious connections to the land of Israel, but also from Zionist-nationalist desires.

The question that has remained in the background of so many of our experiences and learning this year thus returns: What does it mean for Israel to be a Jewish state? How is this reflected (or not) in the policies and actions of the state, and how should Judaism as a religious code and ethic come into play in determining our actions and attempting to fix the incessant problems in Israeli society?

Continuing with the internal thought process of Jewish religious identity versus nationalist identity also returned me to this question: In our long history, Jews have had a dual identity as wanderers (in the desert, in exile in Babylonia and then throughout the Diaspora) and as permanent citizens of the physical land of Israel. A hallmark of the Jewish experience has been our ability to build community wherever in the world we have gone - Sukkot is partially a shout-out to this ability, as is the entire Rabbinic tradition born out of exile as we transformed Judaism from a religion based on Temple rites to one based on prayer and halakha.

[I should note here that when I discussed this thought with Naamah, another Dorot fellow, she made the excellent point that even during our wanderings, our thoughts and hopes revolved around our pining for Jerusalem, our longing to return to "our" land, a land promised to us. This is as much a hallmark of Judaism as is our existence wandering in exile.]

Looking to the times in our history when we've held nationalist power - e.g. the kingdoms of Judea and Samaria, Jerusalem under King Herod and the Hasmonean Kings - and we've been subject to the same hypocritical, corrupt tendencies that have befallen just about any and every sovereign ruling power.

The same can be said today. In building the state of Israel, there has constantly been this tension between religious and nationalist identity. And for all the idealistic underpinnings of the state, from the kibbutz movement to "making the desert bloom" (although that one has questionable motives even so) Israel suffers from the same birthing problems of any other sovereign state (underscored again today during our Dorot seminar on Bedouin peoples in Israel, a situation for which the parallels to US treatment of Native American populations is terrifying).

At the heart of it, and the question that was by far most difficult was this: Given the problems of sovereignty in Israel and throughout our history, is nationalism corroding modern Judaism? We may quickly be reaching the point of no return in the Israel-Palestine question (if we haven't already), wherein a two-state solution is no longer feasible. And there are many differences of opinion as to what this means for Israel as a state - but none of them are particularly optimistic.

Continually, from the serious environmental problems to "solutions" for the Bedouin peoples' land claims to the erecting of the security wall (particularly its route...but there isn't near enough space to go into that now), I am struck by the short-sightedness of the Israeli government's decisions and actions. The quick-fixes, band-aids quickly slapped onto deeply troubling problems, are not working and won't. Israel needs to consider it's larger future, or I fear that in 100 years (or less) Israel will have crumbled in on itself, and the dream will be over.

I'll end, for now, with perhaps the most powerful sentiment expressed during the Encounter experience. During our final session, the facilitator for our small group shared a conversation she'd had recently with a friend of hers, a 103 year old woman who has lived in the land of Israel since the 1930's. Looking back over the last century - the British Mandate, the founding of the state, and the extraordinary efforts to build Israel as a Jewish state - and considering the profound problems plaguing Israel today, the woman said:

"This isn't what we meant."

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Chagim b'Yerushalayim

Wow. Being in Jerusalem for the Chagim (high holy days) is exhausting! But also wonderful, rejuvenating, and so very different than last time I was here for them. And, they're not even done...Sukkot starts in some 26 hours or so...

First off, let's talk davening. The structure of davening during Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur is not all that different from any other service, particularly Shabbat. But as most Jews can tell you, it's a hell of a lot longer. But how many "high holy day Jews" can tell you why they're so long? Not to delve overly into specifics but with some additional prayers, blessings and psalms here and there, mostly the services of the chagim are simply the usual prayers "filled out" by extra oomph as we transition from the past year into the new year.

In particular, the repetition of the Amidah, in which the Hazzan (person who is "leading" the service) vocally repeats the entirety (and then some often) of the personal Amidah the entire congregation has individually recited softly. This takes some time. And if one doesn't realize this is what's happening (and I can't even count how many years I went without knowing this) then essentially you're just sitting there in schul while the hazzan recites pages and pages of hebrew.

Two essential bits of knowledge really changed my davening experience this year:

a) The hazzan's repetition of the Amidah really is important, not just fluff. Why? There's a good chance that during our individual recitations of the Amidah, we've made a mistake (or several). While understandable, this is rather worrisome if you subscribe to the belief that the prayers you recite during the Chagim, and their delivery, are directly responsible for whether you get written into the Book of Life (vs the Book of Death) for the upcoming year. Enter: the Hazzan, whose repetition of the Amidah serves to represent the entire congregation, meaning in case you made a mistake during your individual Amidah, the hazzan has you covered. Multiply that by a couple hundred congregants though, and the hazzan has a huge responsibility! He or she is responsible for covering the mistakes of the entire congregation for which he or she is davening...no pressure. This means you should thank your hazzan, because while you sit there tuning in and out of pages and pages of hebrew, the hazzan is busy getting your back. It also means he or she had better know what they're doing.

b) Important as the repetition is, it's really long. And it's totally legit to bring in some supplemental reading (as long as it's relevent...harry potter maybe not so much...one teacher recommended Sh.Y. Agnon's Days of Awe which I found perfect) to occupy yourself while the hazzan is chanting away. Maybe even preferable, since if you're not reading there's a good chance you're just sitting there thinking bored thoughts about, well, whatever, whereas if you bring in some relevant reading you're keeping yourself engaged in the spirit of the chag.

Knowing this, I was able to prepare myself in a very different way than ever before. I had a much better idea of what was happening during t'fillot and was to able to keep myself engaged when before I would just have been bored. And, as I hopped around to different schuls, which is impossible in Spokane, I also got to experience several different styles of davening, which was also really nice.

The other really great chag experience: community. For every meal (except breakfast) there is a gathering. Which means two dinners and two lunches...and since I was at a different friend's meal for each (mostly either Dorot friends or Pardes friends and extended), it meant I got to spend some great time with many different friends at each meal (with of course a bit of overlap, but really a lot of different groups for each meal), eating good food, drinking wine and enjoying good company. This is something really only possible in Jerusalem.

Also, so completely different from Nativ, because these were my friends, inviting me to their homes for these meals. Contrast this with Nativ, when meals were either with the entire program at our homebase, or if you went to someone's home it was likely because you were set up through the program. That was great for what it was then, but it just reinforces how different my life is in Jerusalem now, and how very worthwhile it is to spend this time living here again, though I spent half my Nativ year living here.

A final note on Kol Nidre, perhaps the most important individual service for me of all the chagim because of my personal connection playing one of the recitations on cello for my home schul in high school. I always hope to find a Kol Nidre experience that will really take me somewhere...and sadly this hasn't happened for most of my Kol Nidre experiences in the past 7 years. This year, I heard some great things about the Leeder Minyan, so I decided to check it out. And it was really, truly a wonderful experience. Leeder Minyan is mostly young to middle-aged Jews, very Carlebach-y davening (lots of niggun singing, harmonization, longer melodies, etc), and while it has a mechitza it's very informal with just a table between the sections (rather than a full-height curtain) and a fair amount of mixing around the peripheries of the seating areas. With all the singing, it's also very long - about 3.5 hours - but it's Kol Nidre in Jerusalem...what else are you going to do? And since I didn't even bring my watch, I really barely noticed the time.

Something in particular that really did it for me was that as we got to the kaddish prayer just before the start of the Amidah, we began singing a beautiful, spirited niggun (a niggun is a melody sung without words, a classic form of Jewish musical expression whose roots are mainly in Hassidic Judaism) that lasted for probably ten minutes, with two or three upswells and downswells before quietly settling out as people began their individual Amidah prayers. As we began singing the niggun, I had pulled my tallis over my head (Kol Nidre is also the sole evening service in the entire year when the tallis is worn) and found that by the time the niggun came to an end I was completely in my own spiritual space, carved out in the midst of this community surrounding me, completely ready to daven my personal Amidah, completely in the moment. It was perhaps the most intense spiritual moment I've ever experienced in an indoor "schul" setting.

So, all in all a really wonderful chagim experience thus far...and Sukkot is yet to come! Someone mentioned a day or two ago that while Yom Kippur is about being inside, with community, Sukkot is about getting outside the synagogue and community walls, going out into the world and being present not only in our small communities but also the greater community. As such, a few of us are going backpacking, which of course is really exciting for me. Probably the Negev, but maybe up north in the Galil...check back in a week or so from now for the update on how that went :-)

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Changes

I wrote the following as an early assignment for a Creative Writing course I'm taking in Jerusalem at Pardes. I think it reflects some of how my experiences here have changed, and how I am so often in dialogue internally with my last year-long stay in Israel...

14 September 2008

For this first out-of-class assignment, I've chosen to sit in front of the Super HaMoshava on Emek R'Fayim. The Why is simple: it was here, just off Emek R'Fayim, that I lived the last time I was in Israel, seven years ago, at Beit Nativ.

It was here that I gorged on Burger's Bar - before it became a sizable chain, and existed in a small hole where the cook/cashier chain-smoked as he prepared the delicious burgers. And yes, they tasted better back then.

It was on Emek that I ordered heaping portions of Thaliandi stir-fry in an effort to quell my rumblings resulting from lack of good Asian food. I gave them a lot of business back then. Now, they are gone.

It was at Beit Nativ, on Yoshua bin Nun street, just off Emek, that we sat, seven years and three days ago, watching together in silence, as one - then two - airplanes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It was in that living room, just off Emek R'Fayim, that I whispered a silent prayer of thanks through my stunned senses that, as we watched the towers fall, my sister had decided to go to work late that day. She worked in the WTC building next door. She was still at home when I called some thirty minutes earlier, getting ready for work, as yet unaware that anything about that day was at all unusual.

It was at Beit Nativ, just off Emek R'Fayim, that I again witnessed terror from afar. I had left the US, having weighed the dangers of terror attacks in Israel witnessed from afar, only to arrive in Israel and find myself again on the other side of the Atlantic, watching. It was here that I watched as the my home country began to make less and less sense. Here, at a strange removal from events at home, I watched an administration co-opt terms like Patriotism and Loyalty and I watched as this administration sent out its hunting dogs on the trail of revenge for an act that, however terrible and despicable, I felt we did not fully understand. It was here that I witnessed the first moments in the subsequent tarnishing of our nation's image in the world around us. I watched how pity and empathy were inverted into scorn and disbelief.

So much has change since I lived here seven years ago. My bag still gets checked when I enter a school or cafe, but I can sit and enjoy my meal or coffee without wondering whether the backpack of the sketchy man who just came in contains the device that will blow this place apart.

There is life here, where seven years ago were only the trappings of those who chose to come anyway, despite the atmosphere of danger. Instead of Thailandi, now, there is Soya - three times the menu, three times the expense. Instead of Burger Ranch, there's an Aroma coffee shop. And where once sat the Kabbala Center, there is now a Buffalo Steakhouse.

The place isn't the same. But then, how could it be? For I also am not the same as I was, seven years ago, living in Beit Nativ, just off Emek R'Fayim.

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GOP VP Pick Gov. Sarah Palin - a Powerful choice

Within the last few hours the McCain campaign has announced its pick for VP candidate and brought Alaska Governor Sarah Palin onstage for her first appearance with McCain in Dayton, OH. Obviously there's a lot to be said about the historical nature of her candidacy as the first female GOP VP candidate. And the question of whether Hillary Clinton's female supporters will be swayed to vote Republican in November is a significant question. But what struck me about the choice as she walked onstage with her husband and children was the brilliant and potent connection she has to small-town America. It's nothing new that the Republican party has historically spoken louder to small-town America than the Democratic party - but with this choice, McCain may have officially eradicated Obama's chances of winning over any significant portion of this demographic.

Why am I so struck by Palin? Follow the jump and I'll tell you...


As McCain's pick for VP became increasingly apparent, I was intrigued by Palin's story - born in Sandpoint, Idaho (a small, wonderful community that I call a second home) and raised in Alaska; an Alum from the University of Idaho (a partner in my AmeriCorps stint after college) and of course her rise from city council member to mayor to governor.

But it wasn't until she appeared onstage with her husband and children that I thought Shit. Small-town, middle America is going to LOVE Sarah Palin.

First of all, her family is beautiful. Not in the rich, manicured sense often seen in political families, but in a manner which will resonate in the hearts of an awful lot of townfolk across America. Her husband is handsome, grizzled, tall and has an easy smile - and has no problem letting his wife take the stage while he stands with the kids. Her daughters are beautiful, and while I haven't seen what her oldest son looks like, he joined the US Army a year ago (on, um, Sept. 11) and, well, who doesn't like a young man in uniform? Oh, and did I mention her youngest son, born just a few months ago, has been diagnosed with Downs Syndrome? It's like something ripped straight out of the human interest section of People Magazine..except they're all standing on stage with Senator John McCain accepting the GOP VP nomination.

Her husband has been a commercial fisherman, in the steel-worker's union and is a classic back-woods outdoorsmen. She herself is a former union member and, Jesus, used to get up at 3 am to hunt with her father. I can't speak enough to the ways in which she, her family, and their stories will resonate with small town residents with whom I've celebrated bagging a 6'3" bear a fireman has been tracking for 5 weeks or a moose big enough to feed the family for two years. And, by the way, whose teenagers are the ones shipping off to Iraq.

And what was the Obama campaign's first response? To belittle her as a "mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience." Yes, this is a true statement. And it's also a statement that, combined with his image as an elitist, foreign candidate, I fear will push away any of the small-town Americans who may have been warming to his candidacy. When held up with the image I saw of Gov. Palin as a strong executive leader, warm mother of a radiant family spread between Iraq and Downs Syndrome and gracious supporter and ardent champion of the American people - including those who don't live in the cities but often struggle as much as any impoverished urban community - I can't help but think that John McCain has made a brilliant choice in his selection of GOP running mate.

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What would Shacharit-Yoga look like?

I'm sitting here with all this excess energy manifesting itself as heat radiating from the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet -- hardly the first time this has happened, and not the first time I've wondered whether there was some useful outlet I could channel this energy towards, perhaps along the lines of Reiki or some such. At any rate, I thought about the idea of "spirituality through movement," which is an idea important enough to me, in theory at least, that it is part of the reason behind the Lotus flower tattooed on my back.

So I began to think about morning rituals.


The first that came to mind was Shacharit, the traditional Jewish morning prayer. Before this thought, I should say, I spent some time attempting to channel this excess energy out of my body and into the world where perhaps it could warm someone in need of warmth while simultaneously cooling down my body. So I began to think of how, for many, the favored time for meditation is in the early morning...which in turn led me to think of the Jewish form of morning meditation - Shacharit.

Built into the structure of the Shacharit service is a scaffolding of prayers often compared to the ascending of a mountain. The initial prayers begin the process of removing sleep from the eyes and warming up one's soul as the prayers continue their progression towards higher planes of spirituality and kavanah (intention). At the peak of the service is the Amidah, during which one draws into his most introspective, personal self while at the same time attempting to open up to the sense of awe and connectedness to the world (at least, that's one way that I see it). Just as a climber cannot remain forever at a mountain peak, though, Shacharit continues into the "cool-down" prayers that gradually bring the davener back into the normal, physical space from which he or she can continue their day.

The previous paragraph is of course a hugely understated summary of the structure and progression of a traditional Jewish t'fillah, but serves its purpose in that there are parallels between its structure/progression and that of meditation and movement practices such as yoga or tai chi whose goal is to integrate body, mind and spirit - moving between planes and from physical spaces into spiritual and back. After all, one doesn't begin an hour of yoga by jumping straight into intricate twists, back bends or balancing acts. And in Shacharit (or any t'fillah, for that matter), one does not just jump straight into the Amidah. Just as there are bows and rhythmic movements during Shacharit that help stimulate blood flow to the muscles as well as the brain, Yoga often begins with sun salutations and forwards bends. So I begin to think now about ways in which a practiced yoga-practitioner could develop a progression of movements that parallel the progression of prayer during Shacharit, and how, with practice, the two could become an intertwined practice of morning meditation, movement and spirituality.

This is a very early thought, and I certainly don't have enough yoga experience to put something like this together just as yet. But as I consider arenas to explore during this fellowship year in Israel, this strikes me as maybe not a bad use of some personal time to begin peeling into some deeper layers of the ideas and motifs I have deemed personally important to who I am and what I value as a Jew and as a person.

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Ok, so it's been awhile - this is true. My apologies for my protracted absence. That said, it's about damn time for an update, so here goes.

Since my last post, I've spent a couple winter months working at Schweitzer Mtn Resort as a ski instructor, which was wonderful and during which I felt probably the healthiest I've felt in at least a few years. So, that was hard to leave, but leave I did before the season was over, to return to Olympic Park Institute where I continued as a field science educator through the spring season. The weather was, well, less than optimal at the start of the season (let's just say that late january-february isn't the best time for olympic peninsula weather) but by the end of the season it was spectacularly gorgeous and, again hard to leave. Follow the jump to find out where I went next :-)


Immediately following a great visit from my sis the last week of May, we drove back to Spokane where I spent a couple days before flying east to Ohio where I spent the summer as Teva Supervisor at Camp Wise, a JCC camp outside of Cleveland. I could write an entire post, or several, about my experiences there, but in short it was a great summer with some very warm and wonderful people, filled with campers small and large, many hikes and hours spent in front of campfires and even a few canoe and backpacking trips thrown in.

Last Sunday, I left camp a couple days early to head to NY for the stateside bit of orientation for the Dorot Fellowship in Israel, which occupies the next ten months of my life! Orientation was both enjoyable and intense, not for it's schedule, which was blessedly relaxed (a welcome change from the hectic pace of camp) but appropriately evocative of both the excitements and the challenges we are set to experience throughout the year. As such, I left orientation with excitement and a head full of thoughts for the challenges the year will bring.

A few other relevant bits of info: there are 12 fellows total, I will be starting off the year in Jerusalem doing ulpan and studying, but may spend time elsewhere after a few months. I'd like to get involved in some environmental work and education, spend as much time as I can traveling, hiking and backpacking (including hiking as much of the Israel National Trail as I can) but will undoubtedly find myself involved in a myriad of other projects and experiences that I have no way of anticipating yet. I have many, many more thoughts both on orientation and the coming year, and fully intend to express them in future posts that will be much more frequent from this point on! So tune back in regularly and if anyone is in Israel then look me up, because I would love to see you!

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costume mishap --> altered persona

"I am a man of the people. The people of Cal-i-fornia."
~Zorro

Well, this Halloween, I wasn't a man for the people of California, but I was an educator for the children of the Olympic Peninsula. Though not my usual self. In fact, a misplaced bandana led to a two-day long social experiment with a few amusing results. Read on below for more!

Last weekend, for the local Halloween party, I dressed up as Zorro. For the past almost 2 months, I'd been growing out my beard so I could trim it down to a Zorro mustache with plenty of length to curl the sides up with adequate flair. Well, I guess I should have gotten some mustache wax, because my hair goo wasn't up to the task...but it was close. One of my more successful costumes in recent memory, it included the hat and cape (which I rented from a costume shop nearby), black bandana with eye holes (pilfered) button-down vest, black shirt with poofy sleeves and black pants (goodwill), calf-high leather boots to tuck my pants into (my own) and a thin-bladed French sword (local pawn shop...not quite a foil, but the closest I could find). A way fun party with live music the first half and then great dance mix the second.

But the real fun begins wednesday. We had two programs this week, both from Sequim Middle School, with half the 6th graders mon-wed, and the other half wed-fri. Wednesday was what we call a crossover day, because one group left as another arrived, and we had but an hour to recuperate and re-energize before grabbing another group and beginning to teach. Wednesday was also Halloween.

I had planned to be Zorro again for the kids, though with black waders and rain pants, a shorter cape, and only the bandana with eye-holes and no hat. But in the morning, I couldn't find my bandana, and had to get to work...so no Zorro. Instead I donned a short cape with a Harry Potter "Gryffindor" crest, and apparently looked like a Seeker with that, my red soft-shell jacket, and black leather driving gloves. That was the morning. The experiment began during the crossover.

Excited to mix up my costume, I looked through the costume box and found several items which, together, changed my look quite a bit:

Item one: thick plastic-framed glasses, with non-prescription lenses, meaning they looked like real glasses.

Item two: an old, trucker-style Pac-Man hat.

Item three: lavender-colored ear-muffs.

Item four: a wool jacket, short, with buttons and a belt-buckle wrap around the waist, kind of like some sort of air force meets gamer jacket.

All together, I looked a little ridiculous. But I decided to have a bit of an experiment. Since these kids had never met me, I decided not only to be in costume, but to alter my entire persona, and continue the experiment thursday as though I wasn't in costume at all on wednesday. So I spoke a bit higher, talked faster, got excited at decidedly nerdy things (well, even more-so than usual) and changed the gait of my walk.

The next step was that night, when I dressed up as an old man as part of our night-hike evening program. With an enormous gray beard, wig, and "old man" makeup, barely any of my face was visible and in the dark I led 4 groups of kids (1 group at a time) to the dock to tell the story of the Lady of the Lake. Marissa dressed up as the Lady, and hid in the canoe next to the dock, and at the appropriate point sat up and scared the heck out of the kids, before calming their fears by explaning that she's a friendly ghost. It was great. And, none of the kids knew who I was. At all.

The next day, I returned to my daytime-dorky persona, and when a few kids asked if I was at the night hike I told them no, I had the night off, which they believed. So I stayed in character the whole day.

This morning, I showed up at morning meeting to tell my kids where to meet me when dismissed -- sans glasses, and also with my mustache shaved off, and with a beanie rather than the trucker hat. When I walked in, gave a quick direction in my normal, lower voice, and then walked out, I heard several kids ask "Hey! Where's Yoshi??" Perfect.

When we met up, I told them I celebrate halloween on fridays, and this was my costume. I got a few head scratches at that. Successful experiment? Check. More analysis of change in social interaction due to different personas pending, for I must be leaving.

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A pleasant encounter after a rockin' (first) solo backpack

As per my last post, I often get annoyed at drivers on the road. So often they're obnoxious, oblivious or obstinate. But today, I had an encounter of the opposite nature that just tickled me.

As I drove out of Olympic Natl. Park earlier today, having just completed my first solo backpacking trip (more on that later), I was having fun speeding around the curves of the road that leads to Hurricane Ridge. As I came around one corner and approached another, a truck approaching me flashed its lights several times. My first reaction was to slow down, which I did, then wondered "why was that guy flashing his lights at me? Did he think I was driving too fast? Hm."

Well, my answer came around that next corner, where I saw a parked Ranger Truck clearly looking for speeders. And, because the dude in the truck had flashed his lights at me (which I now realized was a warning) I was going just over the speed limit -- not nearly fast enough for the ranger to pull me over. Had I not received that warning, however...it quite possibly could have meant a speeding ticket. And who needs that? So, as I drove past the Ranger truck with a wave, I couldn't help but giggle out loud and pumped my fist up in the air with a "rock on!" salute to the driver who warned me that a Ranger was around the corner waiting for speeders like me. Guy in the truck, whoever you are, you rock. I wish more drivers were as thoughtfully awesome as that guy.

That being said...as I mentioned earlier I just completed my first solo backpacking trip. AWESOME. is what it was. I had yesterday and today off work, and figured I should do something worthwhile, and decided to go backpacking in the Olympics, especially since I got a sweet new backpack for my birthday. Since nobody else was off, though, I didn't have any companions...thus the solo. After a couple recs, I decided to start at Obstruction Point, a short drive from Port Angeles, and head out to the Grand Lakes area via the Lillian Ridge traverse. I also wanted to check out Grand Pass/Grandview Peak, but decided I would probably set up camp before that point and then do a quick trip up and back.

So, I headed out from the trailhead right about 1130 after eating an enormous breakfast at The Haven in PA - veggie scramble plus one slice of their special autumn french toast, since I couldn't decide btwn the two options - which was totally delish. Good thing I was going backpacking, because I ate a lot. After filling my water bottle at the Hurricane Ridge Visitor's Center, I headed down Obstruction Pt. Road, which is decidedly treacherous at some points and I don't recommend if you have a serious fear of heights. After not too long, though, I got the trailhead and got myself ready to head out.

The trail heads up a nice little uphill stretch - just long enough to get the legs burning - and then cuts along Lillian Ridge with awe-striking views of the escalating mountains to the southwest and timber-filled Badger Valley to the northeast. I expected rain sometime in the afternoon, and the clouds didn't seem like they would let me down as they cast a thick wool blanket over the sky and the wind tore around the ridge.

After a mile and a half or so, the trail begins cutting down into Grand Valley, along steep talus-strewn slopes that made me glad I brought along trekking poles. Grand Lake came into view after another mile, and after a succession of switchbacks that brought me into a dark and cool fir forest and a couple small stream crossings I found myself at the junction above Grand Lake where I took a break before heading further to Moose Lake and eventually to Gladys Lake where I made my camp.

Gladys Lake is the smallest of the three tarns - small mtn lakes, often formed in cirques created by glaciers that carved out the mountainside and then left a lip in their wake as they receded - in Grand Valley, with a house-sized boulder sitting on the peninsula that extends into the middle of the tarn. Though adequately tired out, I kept looking past the first campsite to see what other options I had, and found a perfect little heather meadow nestled into the slope just on the other side of the lip that holds the lake. With a rectangular flat area on ground slightly higher than the dangerously tempting flat circular recession a few yards away (a bad idea, especially with rain in the forecast), which would become my cooking area, and a near-horizontal fallen tree suspended a good twenty feet off the ground - perfect for hanging a bear-line - I knew I had found my site.

I got some water boiling to make some miso to go with my peanut butter crunch Clif Bar (dipped in peanut butter - mmm) and got my tent set up, and just as I got my bear-bag hung the rain began to drizzle. Tired as I was, with plenty of day left to spare, I crawled into my sleeping bag to enjoy my miso, read a bit and take a nap. Disaster nearly struck when I knocked my miso cup onto the tent floor, but luckily it stayed in a constrained puddle long enough for me to slurp most of it up before it could spread all over (my tent is clean...right?). While I wiped it up pretty well with my camp towel, I had kind of broken the whole "no food in the tent" rule pretty badly...hopefully the rain and falling temperatures would keep the bears from snooping too closely? Hm.

At any rate, I awoke from my nap to discover that the rain had stopped (and that a deer and fawn were grazing outside my tent - hullo), so I grabbed the window of time to hike up to Grand Pass, another mile+ or so up the trail. My pack substantially lighter without my food, tent, sleeping bag, pad, etc., my legs nonetheless burned and groaned the entire way up. I made it to the top though, and a little further up to Grandview Peak (6670 ft), and was treated to astounding views of Lake Lillian and McCartney Peak to the southwest, Cameron Creek down in the valley to the south, and Grand Valley and another valley whose name I couldn't figure out (Lillian River Valley?) to the northeast and north. As the wind kicked up and clouds swept by around me at right about 6 pm, I gave a good whoop that echoed in the valleys and then made my way back down to camp.

The rain started coming down again just as I got into camp (sweet timing) and I got water going for dinner. Scrumptious. Just as it was getting dark, I pulled my headlamp out, which opened at the same time and I heard something roll down my pack and into the underbrush. Looking at my headlamp, I saw that two batteries were missing, so reached around in the bushes and found one battery pretty quickly despite the quickly receding light. The second, however, proved a rather different story. After a few minutes of poking around trying to feel it, I decided some light was in order. How ironic. The headlamp with a missing battery being my only light, and having not brought extra batteries (oops) I pulled out a lighter and used the small light from the flame to search around for that elusive battery. A good ten minutes later, it was still nowhere to be found. Well, I wasn't panicked - I could certainly feel my way back into my tent and into my sleeping bag, and didn't think I would need the light for an emergency hike-out. But it was only 7:45 and I wanted to read for awhile before bed. About to resign myself to the darkness, I had one last idea spring to mind and reached into my backtop to find that the other battery had fallen not onto the ground but into this pocket. Hooray!

Headlamp on head, I escaped the rain and read up on the Natural History of the Olympics for a couple hours while I warmed myself up. It was really hard to pull myself out of my sleeping bag and into the rain to pee, but I knew I wouldn't sleep well without peeing first. So, having peed, I wondered whether the rain would last all night, and whether enough would seep in through the seams I forgot to seam-seal to be problematic, and then went to sleep.

I awoke about 2:30 to discover that the rain had stopped, and poked my head out to see that, though a thin veil of clouds covered the just-past-full moon, it was still bright beyond belief and my entire campsite was lit in a pale and serene (and kind of spooky) glow such that I half expected wolves to wander through and break the quiet with their howling, despite wolves having been extirpated from the Olympics back in the 1920s. Needless to say, a really cool moment that was much appreciated before pulling back in and going back to sleep.

After sleeping in, I was glad to hear that the rain had not returned, and was even more surprised to find sun and blue sky above when I got out of the tent. Not that it was warm, mind you. The beads of rain from earlier in the night had frozen to the tent and the heather was frosted through the meadow. But seeing the valley in the sunlight was a beautiful contrast to the also beautiful shades of grey from the day before. So I made some tea and grabbed my siddur.

In order to find some sunlight, I took my tea and siddur with me across the stream nearby and davened shacharit in the crisp sunlight with a chilly wind occasionally blowing through. Interestingly, as I approached the Amidah I felt distinctly warmer between the wind calming down and the sun climbing higher in the sky. I walked back to my campsite humming nigguns and got breakfast water going.

While waiting for my food to hydrate, I did a few of my favorite katas and Mon Gon Teon (that will only make sense to a few of you) to loosen up and get the blood flowing, and chowed down before packing up camp and heading out. Saying a hooray inside for the continuing sunlight, I soon passed Grand Lake and turned northeast to head back along the Badger Valley trail to loop back to Obstruction Point. Following Grand Creek down Grand Valley before crossing over to Badger Valley and climbing up out the Badger Creek drainage, this trail is longer but less steep and stays lower for longer as it passes through thicker fir forests than my previous route. It also shows opportunities for some very cool water features on Grand Creek - ie the splendiferous waterfall I went off trail to get a good view of and the smaller drop-off into a brown-tinted pool that almost looked more like it belonged in Australia than in the Olympics, where I took a break and ate a chocolate brownie clif bar smeared with peanut butter and drizzled with honey on top. Backpacking lets you make such great creations.

Anyway, the legs were mad tired as I climbed out through the Badger Creek drainage, and while the sun was still shining here and there as the clouds opened (wow they move quickly) the temperature was definitely dropping and around 3:30 some tiny snowflakes whisped around me (apparently it snowed at nearby hurricane ridge). The final climb up to Obstruction Peak was a haul, but well worth it as I got to my car at 5 and chatted for a minute with an elderly couple coming up to see the view.

So, fully satisfied with my quick trip out n' around, I came back into town and chowed down a huge portion of phad thai, and am now chilling at the house in port angeles listening to Blake attempt to control the girls by talking to them like the girls he coaches in soccer - "Kris! A spoon and ice cream now or you gotta run a lap!" It's not working very well. Maybe someone should remind him that there really is a doghouse outside.

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Like most good environmentalists, few things get me more riled up while driving than the sight of an enormous Hummer roaring down the blacktop. But today, while driving back to the Olympic Peninsula after spending Yom Kippur in Spokane, I chanced an encounter that was almost beyond absurd.

Somewhere between Cle Ellum and North Bend as I drove through Snoqualmie Pass (rugged territory, I know...especially where the highway goes from two lanes to four; good thing I have an all wheel drive Suby) I approached a bright yellow Hummer.

What struck me first was that this was an old-school Hummer, back from the days when Hummers (or were they called Hum-Vees back then? I'm not sure we ever got that figured out) were still a sight that aroused a response more akin to "what the hell is that thing??" than "[insert numerous expletives, curses and hexes here]" like today.

As I came closer, I saw that the Hummer had a Jesus fish on its rear bumper, and a stenciled window decal of Jesus -just the face with the crown of thorns, not the whole body crucifixion- on the back window. Hm. Not your usual Hummer flair.

With an eyebrow raised, I passed the Hummer in the right lane and was rendered speechless by the phrase I could see in my rearview mirror, repeated twice along the bottom of the windshield: "Team Extreme."

Wow. An old-school, bright yellow Hummer (or is it HumVee?) with Jesus stickers on the back and Team Extreme blazing across the windshield in front. Needless to say there were also rally-car high-beam lights affixed to the top. Anyone who has seen Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle will appreciate the wonderful irony of seeing this phenomenon in real life. I almost feel blessed that I had such a rare opportunity today, were it not for the faint rumble of nausea that accompanied the experience.

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an update on the life

Well my goodness a lot has happened since my last post. Most of the people who actually read this blog (my mom, my sister, maybe maggie and rachel...maybe...any other consistent readers I don't know about?) will already know, but I decided not to take the fellowship in boston. yadda yadda but it wasn't the right choice for me this year. After looking into things, and flying to Chicago unsure of where I would go once I picked up Shayna's car, I got a voicemail upon landing from Kim at the Olympic Park Institute (OPI), who I had called the week before to inquire about any staff openings (and left a message...so had never actually spoken person-to-person), to let me know a couple positions had opened up and she would like to speak with me. Long story short(er) - I sent her my resume etc, we spoke the next day on the phone, I got an offer the next morning, and the next morning (last saturday) I left chicago to drive west.

4 full days of driving (and 2,269 miles) later, I was at Kim's house for a welcome dinner where I met new and returning staff, and then went to the house - Le Sage, as it's called - across the lake from OPI where I'll be living this fall. And discovered I have no cell phone reception or internet out there (but do have a landline phone). Definitely felt like I'd regressed 12 years back to the mid-90s. But it's absolutely gorgeous, right on glacier-fed Crescent Lake, with an enormous deck, dock and boathouse, and I share it with 2-4 other staffers (depending on whether Margaret and Chris, a staff couple, are sleeping there or at the house in town).

The next morning, I caught a ride in to the OPI campus with one of my housemates (Claire) and saw it for the first time, just 20 minutes before new staff training started. Hard to believe that just a week earlier at roughly the same time I was boarding a plane to Chicago without any idea what I would be doing, and now I was starting a new job. Oh, what is this job, exactly? Excellent question, and I suppose one that would have been good to answer a couple paragraphs ago. I'll be a field science educator here at OPI; essentially a field instructor, very similar to the environmental education work I was doing at MOSS, but teaching a wider range of ages and topics.

So far, staff training has been going well. The new staff get along really well, and the older staff are all very open and enthusiastic. Right now I'm at the staff house in town (port angeles) where they just got internet installed. Tonight we'll probably head to Le Sage for dinner, which none of the other new staff have seen yet, and tomorrow we're hoping to go to Port Townsend for the wooden boat festival, which should be fun.

So that's about it for now. I'm sure I'll update more later as more happens, but I'm super excited to continue staff training and then start teaching in a week. It seems like a great community, and I think I'll have the opportunity to learn a heck of a lot. Righteous.

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oregano with the wind

There's an oregano field just outside Rathdrum, ID that I pass when traveling to/from Sandpoint. the past couple times the herb has been in full bloom, a shimmering facade of purple over green topped only by the incredible smell.

In the house on Manito Blvd where I grew up, we used to have a patch of oregano growing in the garden. Situated as it was along the dilapidated sports court between our house and the back alley - which was the usual route home, whether from school or from our grandparents' house around the corner - I passed the oregano cluster sometimes several times a day, and it's a smell ingrained into my childhood, much like picking fresh blackberries and raspberries from the fence along the alley. Being a smell, though, it hits something different from the somewhat more abstract memory of picking berries - though I'm sure if I were standing along a blackberry bush, its smell would hit me similarly.

Anyway, the point is really just that the oregano field smells totally, absolutely, completely wonderful and is just one more reason I'm glad I started taking a different route between Spokane and Sandpoint, bypassing Coeur d'Alene for the Rathdrum Prairie with its rural golden fields and aromas.

[end]

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A Reason to Worry

On my way to Coeur d'Alene this morning, I saw a bumper sticker that read:

"Why worry? God is in control."

Incidentally, the car also had a Bush/Cheney '04 sticker on the window as well. The combination really got me thinking - what a terrible philosophy to go about your daily life with. It's tantamount to saying humans have no responsibility for the consequences of our actions and decisions, whether for ourselves, for others or for our planet.

Let's take global warming as an obvious issue that I'm concerned with. To follow this bumper sticker ideology, we shouldn't worry. And we shouldn't feel the need to take any responsibility either. Sure, the climate is changing, the ice caps are melting, sea levels will rise, populations up to the millions may die or get displaced by flooding as coastal cities find themselves off-coast disaster areas. Infectious diseases will spread increasingly rapidly, drought will juxtapose flooding, food will be scarce - but why worry? God is in control.

We could look at any number of issues - Iraq, Darfur, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - and excuse ourselves from responsibility because hey, God is in control. Iraq is a mess, but clearly God wants us to interfere with the spread of Islam and is in control in Iraq. Millions are dying from disease and conflict, but it's God's bidding, so why worry?

As I see it, the last thing God would say to humanity right now is not to worry. If anything, God would say "My children, why aren't you doing more?! How can you continue destroying your brothers and sisters and my earth??" God would want us not only to worry about the state of the world, but to also do something about it. Tikkun Olam. I just cannot submit to a fatalistic view of God's will. As Jews, we are taught that we've been given stewardship over this planet and all its - God's - creatures. Stewardship has a very specific connotation, different from ownership or signing a lease. A steward is defined as one who administers anything as the agent of another or others. We've been placed in charge, been given this charge, by God to administer the affairs of this earth, which places a huge amount of responsibility in our hands.

For better or for worse, God may be in control, but not in the way the bumper sticker implies. God is in control the same way as a parent or teacher is, who gives their children or students a task and then sits back to watch as the child is then free to make mistakes, to find failures and ultimately successes. In this way, the child is taught accountability for their decisions and actions. They cannot rely on the mantra: "mommy and daddy will make it all ok." And we cannot rely on the mantra: "Don't worry, God is in control, and will make it all ok." If there exists a messianic era to come, we have a lot of work to do - work that only we, as humans, can choose to do - before we've prepared each other and the world for that era.

So don't tell me not to worry. I will worry, as long as humans continue to dominate and destroy each other, as long as humans destroy the planet and its resources. But I will also hope, and that goes hand in hand with worrying. Because if you concede that God is the only factor controlling everything, then it doesn't matter what we do as humans. And if it doesn't matter what we do, what significance do we have in our destinies, individual or collective? I can't accept this lack of significance. So I will worry, and I will hope, and I will choose to take responsibility, because that's what God asks of us.

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karmic(?) ubsurdity

I had a day yesterday. I suspect karma may have something to do with it, but if that is indeed true, I'm worried because I really don't know what I've done. At any rate . . .

My day began with heading down to the emissions testing center since my (17 yr old) astrovan is need of renewal. It didn't pass. At all. I'll need to take care of that.

Possible source of weird joojoo number one: polluting the environment despite not only being an environmentalist but working in the field.


So, after this disappointing news, I got on the road to head back to Sandpoint for a couple days. Traffic was getting questionable as I approached Post Falls, so I decided to try a different route that had been on my radar for awhile, but through which I'd never actually gone. This route took me through Rathdrum and spit me out back on 95, north of Coeur d'Alene, thus bypassing the corridor with lots of traffic lights and potentially heavy traffic. Saved me 5-10 minutes, and is a more pleasant drive.

So ok, feeling pretty good after this. Arrive at the hatchery to find that the bench and, more importantly, my mailbox that sits on top of the bench, are gone. Hm. See the bench a ways off under some trees (my guess - appropriated for sitting...suspicious) and find my mailbox inside the hatchery building. Fourth of July cleaning? Perhaps. But in case there was any attempt to deliver me my mail, it would have been unsuccessful this week, which is not a good thing. I'll have to check with the post office on that.

Go into my trailer to discover that the little (probably 3-6 mm long, or smaller) spotted beetle-bugs that I occasionally found around my trailer before this week have multiplied in my absence to a number best described as problematic. Work up quite the sweat getting rid of all of them I can find (it's approaching 100 degrees outside, and my trailer isn't any cooler). I think I made a solid dent in their population, but I still find them frequently for the next 20 hours. I will probably find more when I return for lunch.

Ok, so having scourged the trailer of beetle-bugs (I don't have a more specific name as of now), pores saturated and body covered with sweat, I jump in the lake. This part is not odd or bizarre, just nice and refreshing. I then head into town to get some work done at the library.

After leaving the library, I swing by the store for some groceries, and then back through town to get on the main road that takes you out of town and across the bridge south on 95. There's often some backed-up-ness on this road, so I when I see a long line of cars ahead of me as I approach the T-intersection, I don't worry, just wait for some nice person to let me in so I can join the waiting fun. After moving approximately 1.72 blocks in 8 minutes, traffic stops completely. Less than a block ahead of me, I can see the traffic light for the right turn, and as it goes from green to yellow to red to green to yellow to red to green . . . you get the idea . . . and we haven't moved a foot, I start to get suspicious. It's seeming less and less like your run of the mill traffic slow down. Eventually, I realize we ain't goin' nowhere anytime soon, so I cut the motor, and try not to let the heat and dehydration get to me too much.

After some 35 minutes of people watching and eight or nine songs on the radio later, traffic starts to creep. We even crawl for a few minutes, then creep again. A woman walking along the sidewalk who had come from the other direction (traffic was only stopped going our way) told us it's bad, and it's gonna be awhile. Well, it had already been awhile, but seeing as I really needed to get back to my trailer at some point, and the only other options were driving 1.5-2 hours west around the lake or parking my van in town and walking, I decided to sit it out a bit longer. Just as I began weighing options for walking - ie what I should take with me, what I could just leave in the van, whether I could reasonably carry all my perishable groceries as well as my laptop the 4 or so miles back, etc - we began crawling again, and then even bearwalking!

So, at a slowish pace, we finally crossed the bridge. There had indeed been an accident, and a doozy of one too. Just past the two gas stations between the long-bridge and town (those of you familiar with Sandpoint will know what I'm talking about) was a small, oldish hatchback with its front completely smashed in and a SUV flipped completely upside down, with its top half (think a horizontal line from the top of the hood back - everything above that) completely smashed flat. Glass and flecks of paint and plastic everywhere, of course, but what struck me as I drove past (I got a better look than usual since we were going so slow) was that you could see all the random little things that are tossed in various pockets and corners. Little bottles of lotion and sunscreen, a granola bar, a pen or two - that kind of thing. And then I wondered, How does that even happen? There's a bit of a curve in the road there, and the speed limit drops from 55 to 35, but this wasn't a flipped over in a ditch kind of thing. It was just laying there in the middle of a two-lane road, hemmed in with guard rails on either side. Perhaps the driver was distracted and realized they were going to run into the slowed or stopped cars ahead, and swerved radically, thus flipping themselves? And the small little hatchback ran into them from behind? No clue. I do hope that nobody was seriously injured. I also wonder if we have some sort of preordained traffic destiny. Maybe each of us has a specific length of time required to sit in traffic, and where we scoop off the top in one case to save time, we'll get pounded at another time. For example, while I saved 5-10 minutes of traffic by swinging through Rathdrum instead of CdA, I obviously lost substantially more than this later that day.

At any rate, I finally got back to my trailer an hour after departing Safeway (rather than the usual 12-15 minutes), and when I went to grab my groceries saw that a chocolate bar had not only melted at the bottom of the paper bag, in the extreme heat it had oozed all over, getting gooey chocolate and cocoa oils everywhere. Well, I sigh, but nothing is ruined (besides a good part of my chocolate bar) so I salvage what's left of the chocolate and put it in the fridge to solidify it, clean the goo off everything else, and decide to mix myself a glass of emergen-C to help with this headache I've developed somewhere between the library and home.

I grab the full Brita filter I so thoughtfully placed in the fridge before leaving, fill up my favorite glass, dump in a packet of lemon-lime and a packet of raspberry (they taste way better when you mix them), and give the glass a good stir. I take the glass in my right hand, lift it towards my mouth, and am startled to find that the bottom of the glass is no longer attached to the portion of the glass actually in my hand and emergen-C has gushed out this newfound waterway and is rapidly spreading across the counter, stove and floor like a little pink mini-lake missoula flooding across the Columbia Plateau.

At this point I grabbed my phone, stepped outside my trailer, sat on the step, and called Rachel because I needed to share these events with someone who would understand their absurdity. She agreed, we chatted a bit - this part was also nice - and then I was drawn back into my trailer by the evaporating, increasingly stickified emergen-C coating my countertop.

Thus, back to our chain of odd events. How or when this crack around the lower circumference of my favorite glass which led to a splitting of top and bottom occurred, I have no idea. But I was left with a hollow glass cylinder and a dense paperweight-ish glass-bottom sitting on my countertop, neither of which I wanted there nor in the plastic bag I call my trash either (sharp and heavy glass inside flimsy plastic seemed like a poor choice). So, what to do?

My first inclination was to smash them gleefully against the rocks on the shoreline, but then you've got broken glass everywhere, which is not a good thing. So instead, I took the top cylinder into the hatchery building, and threw it in the trash sitting inside the bathroom where I shower and go No. 2 (and where it sat for several days mocking me before it was eventually covered by paper towels), and decided that, due to its heft and the bizarre nature of the whole thing, the bottom portion of the glass deserved a different fate. Its fate, I decided, would be to sit at the bottom of Lake Pend O'Reille for all of eternity. Or at least until forces of water and pressure slowly grind it into bits and pieces at which point it would join the sandy bottom of the lake, and continue its journey through the rock cycle. But, I digress.

Satisfied that I had a good plan, I took this chunk of glass with me to the dock, and, looking at this glass in the palm of my right hand, said something like:

I don't know what it is about today, but there's some bad joojoo going on, some weird and bizarre karma. I'm not sure what the source of all this is, but seeing as you are a direct manifestation of the latest occurrence in a strange day, I imbue within you all the bad joojoo responsible for today's events. As surely as you will sink to the bottom of this lake, may the negative (or at least odd) energy surrounding me find itself vanquished.

With that stoic monologue, I gave the glass bottom a mighty heave, and watched it arc into the lake with a solid splosh. Smiling, I looked down at the hand that had thrown away this manifestation of oddness, and saw that, in the act of throwing, I had made two small but clean lacerations in my first and middle fingers, and sighed at the blood slowly trickling out.

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additional thoughts

Re-watching the mtv global warming video I posted a couple days ago, I thought I would share some additional thoughts. Many of you will no doubt find the message a bit jarring, which I did. Some of you could validly accuse the ad of subscribing to sensationalism, which I think, to an extent, it does. But that doesn't make it wrong.

The key thing I would emphasize when using this kind of approach is that your target audience is everything. College students, my parents, my friends - these types of people are who I would show this video to. Fifth graders? Not a chance. This cuts to the heart of our teaching philosophy at MOSS, which is that we do not teach (/preach) values, we teach science. What is the point of spreading so-called "doom and gloom" messages to students who are too young to actually do anything about it?

Not only is it counter-productive, it can actually be detrimental to our broader goal of instilling that key sense of awe (about the natural world) that is such a huge factor in ultimately making choices that are good for the planet. When students are given depressing messages without the ability to have any impact on what happens, it leads to a kind of nihilistic defeatism - if these things happening are bigger than me, then my choices don't matter, and since I can't have an impact, it's ultimately easier choosing not to care.

That being said, there are some fantastic programs happening around the country that are able to directly mobilize students - at surprisingly young ages - to create local projects that actually do have an impact. The key is that these things have to start local. If you teach your 4th grade class about rainforest destruction half a world away, and have a bake sale to raise money to save the rainforest, then what happens next? The school cuts a check, sends it off to X charity, and at most the kids get some pictures and a thank you note saying "your money saved 1 acre of rainforest land that you'll never actually see!" Ok so I'm totally being hypothetical/fictional - but contrast that to the kinds of local projects that have a tangible impact, whose presence can be seen on a regular basis as kids go through their schoolyards or neighborhoods. And then extend that kind of foundational positive experience to choices made later in life and contrast those choices to our earlier defeatist model. I think it's obvious which the preferred method is.

None of what I'm saying is particularly ground-breaking, and there's a solid amount of literature on these topics out there for further reading. The point I wanted to get across is that while I found the mtv ad worth sharing - it has an important message and is well-crafted - its limitations weigh on me. That being said, if you haven't watched it yet, scroll down and do so!

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Collaboration? No Sweat!

Al Jazeera TV interviews Jewish-American CEO Adam Neiman, No Sweat Apparel, regarding producing a line of union-made T-Shirts in Bethlehem, Palestine:



"Both Israelis and Palestinians agree on this one thing...that more good jobs - in Palestine - will help, and won't hurt."
~Adam Neiman, President, CEO - No Sweat Apparel

"We're working for trade, not aid."
~Bethlehem Factory Manager

A wonderful example of the type of collaboration that will establish roots of change necessary for any sort of permanent solution.

Check out their website here

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I came across this video today in Brad Soulas' advertising blog. In the words of Brad:

SO, instead of counting down the days till the iphone hits stores, causing mass pandemonium, this piece by MTV gives us a countdown for the time left until we have done irreversible damage to good ole' blue/green. The production is stellar, the concept is great and the message, although daunting, is just right.

I couldn't put it much better myself.


note: the text in the video is a little hard to read at this size and resolution, so I copied it here:

Global warming's tipping point means that if we don't do something in the next 10 years . . . it will be too late to do anything at all.

So, there are just ____ days left to save the world.

[end]

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what next? Casa Nueva Vida next!

I've been procrastinating for far too long right now, so this will have to be a quick post, but I thought I should give a quick update now that I've decided what I'm doing next year! That being, Childrens' Education Coordinator at Casa Nueva Vida, a homeless shelter in Boston for single Latina mothers and their children which seeks not only to provide safe, permanent and affordable housing, but also to empower their residents to become independent of all forms of public assistance. I'll be working with children anywhere from infants to high school kids, tracking their progress, coordinating volunteers who come to help tutor, creating and running ed. programs and field trips, etc. Lots of one-on-one time, which will be great, as well as enough administrative work to keep it interesting.

The position is actually a placement for a fellowship with the Jewish Organizing Initiative. I received a conditional acceptance back in April, and have been working on finding a placement since then. It's been a long process (not without its frustrations, as noted in an earlier post) and I'm glad it's over! Friends and family will note (and probably question) that the position has no direct correlation with environmental work -- and this is something that I agree is unfortunate -- but I think the benefits of working in a diverse community, gaining educational experience and a year of training workshops and seminars in organizing through the fellowship program (every friday the fellows come together for this as well as Jewish learning), and the Jewish community created by the fellowship of young Jews interested in social justice will make it a very worthwhile year. My task will then be to bring this experience and learning with me when I return to directly environmental work.

Ok, speaking of work, I'd better get back to it. One last comment though - I'm excited to be back in Boston! Those of you still in the Boston area (and the entire northeast, for that matter) who I haven't been able to see nearly often enough this past year will therefore find me saying hello in person far more frequently :-)

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