Phyllis Edgerly Ring's Blog, page 45

Sustainable farming is not small potatoes

“We’re trying to encourage the idea that the work you do is a part of the natural rhythm of your life and the community of which you’re a part.”

“We farm in order to grow food for people, and we have a connection with those people, whether they live here in Maine or across the country.”

Maine farmers Jim and Megan Gerritsen shared these words nearly eight years ago as we were standing ankle-deep in a field still sodden from Aroostook County’s fifth wet spring in a row. While other families were out having all kinds of fun that Memorial Day, the Gerritsens were planting potatoes. In an ultimate act of service, farmers, especially those on family-sized organic farms, are at the dictates of nature’s schedule.

Readers who see my posts on Facebook know that I often share information about the tireless work Jim Gerritsen is doing, on top of his tireless work as a farmer, to increase understanding about why, in terms of environment and human survival, sustainable agriculture is essential to human welfare.

As I opened my 2014 calendar, I saw that in this final year of the U.N. Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, 2014 is International Year of Family Farming.

A powerful choice for a better future and a fruitful step for this new year is to support those farmers on the front lines – the ones brave enough, and dedicated enough, to pursue sustainable growing when the worshippers of the bottom line want to corporatize the planet – and take its environment down in the process. Each time I go to our local farmers market, I’m gratified to see how the movement to grow and restore real food is – well, growing. Real food helped me heal over the past two years, after the corruption of what’s being done to the food chain nearly killed a lot of us.

I recently unearthed an article of mine at Organic Producer based on interviews with the kind Gerritsens, for those who might like to take a look at the link below. Be sure to visit their lovely, resource-filled web site, too, at: http://www.woodprairie.com/

Article – Family-Scale Farm is Anything But Small Potatoes:

http://www.organicproducermag.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/feature.display/feature_id/24/index.cfm

Snow Fence Road interview and first 2014 giveaway

When Jennifer at Clean Romance Reviews asked what’s the most rewarding thing about being a writer, I struggled to identify just one thing.

Regardless of how writing work develops, or not, is published, or not, finds readers, or not, the real answer is that the gift remains within the experience of writing itself. If I am faithful to it, it is twice as faithful in the ways that it invites — and requires — that I go deep into an interior “waiting room”. There, I listen and watch, and do my best to shape what I encounter and discover into something that might be able to attract others’ hearts – and bolster them. Because that’s always my ultimate goal, in writing, and in living.

My big thanks to Jennifer and Clean Romance Reviews for the interview, and also for the chance to offer another giveaway in connection with Snow Fence Road. This one includes a pair of lovely hand-painted earrings from New Hampshire artist Diane Kirkup of D. Kirkup Designs.

Find the interview and giveaway by scrolling to Jennifer’s Jan. 2 post at:http://www.cleanromancereviews.com

http://www.etsy.com/shop/dkirkupdesigns

Snow Fence Road  A village on the coast of Maine holds painful secrets – the kind only the miracle of new love can heal.

More about the book at: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DDVB106/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00DDVB106&linkCode=as2&tag=leaofthetre-20″>Snow Fence Road<

Patience: a kinder rhythm for the journey

A Blue Sky Comes Out from Hiding. Photo / Kathy Gilman

Since I can count on one hand the teachers who didn’t have to ask me to stop talking in class, it follows that I’m someone who fills multiple journals, year after year, until they take over some pretty serious real estate in our house.

In the past week of reading my gangly, often indecipherable handwriting in some of those pages, I’ve identified the attribute I long to welcome into the coming year like a much-loved and eagerly anticipated guest: Patience.

I want to hear myself say, “That’s all right, I can wait,” more often, and really mean it. Because I know that if I can manage to do this, consciously, and willingly, I’ll also be making a lot more room for trust. And faith.

A Carpeted Fell. Photo / Kathy Gilman

I want to help myself remember that when I welcome patience, allow for it, I tend to react to fewer stressors and potential irritants. Eventually, many of them stop hitting my inner radar screen at all.

Reading years’ worth of journal pages brings home the truth of something writer Zora Neale Hurston said:

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

A Well-Ordered Land. Photo / Kathy Gilman

Patience also seems to require a quiet, steady belief that things will turn out as they need to. This is a powerful contradiction to the less-helpful directions in which most expectations, spun from my mind’s baser qualities, tend to take me.

Castle Rigg with view of Hellvelyn Fell and stone circle, Keswick. Photo / Kathy Gilman

Reading those journal entries, which traveled through so many different sorts of peaks and valleys, also highlighted for me the truth of words of John O’Donohue:

“The soul knows the geography of your destiny. Your soul alone has the map of your future, therefore you can trust this indirect, oblique side of yourself. If you do, it will take you where you need to go, but more important it will teach you a kindness of rhythm in your journey.”

A blessed New Year to each and every fellow journeyer on the path.

And a special thank you to Kathy Gilman for these photographs from the fells of northern England where my mother grew up. It was on long walks in settings just like these where Kathy is hiking now that I first learned about the beauty of patience, trust, and faith. 

In the light of calm

Photo: Lauren Chuslo-Shur

Gleanings found here and there:

“A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your mind is quiet. As the sun upon rising makes the world active, so does self-awareness affect changes in the mind. In the light of calm and steady self-awareness inner energies wake up and work miracles without effort on your part.”

~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“While others are anxious to see you arrive, I praise your vast withstanding of the uncertainty from which all meaning is born.” ~ Toko-pa

“So imperturbable was Abdu’l-Bahá’s equanimity that, while rumors were being bruited about that He might be cast into the sea, or exiled to Fizan in Tripolitania, or hanged on the gallows,

He, to the amazement of His friends and the amusement of His enemies, was to be seen planting trees and vines in the garden of His house, whose fruits when the storm had blown over, He would bid His faithful gardener, Isma’il Aqa, pluck and present to those same friends and enemies on the occasion of their visits to Him.” 

~ Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By

 

How love comes in

Photo: Diane Kirkup / D. Kirkup Jewelry Designs / http://www.etsy.com/shop/dkirkupdesigns

“You have to believe what your heart loves, what it wants. As hard as you can, with everything you’ve got.

That’s the way love comes into the world.” 

~ Andy Hollinger from Snow Fence Road

Never, in my wildest dreams, did I ever imagine a character from a book of mine being quoted by a reviewer — much less a character who never draws breath alive in the story!

In this season of light, and the counting of blessings, my heart feels the utmost thanks for all of the kind readers who’ve made room in their lives for Snow Fence Road, and to Kerry McQuisten and Black Lyon Publishing for believing enough in the story to give it a published home.

And my very special thanks this week to reviewer Barbara Ann at Sun Mountain Reviews for your very kind words:

 “If you are looking for a touching romance novel to curl up with by a roaring fire during the winter holidays, then consider Snow Fence Road, a beautifully written, poignant love story about two lonely individuals who struggle to move beyond their painful, guilt-ridden past to find a second chance at love.”

Find her review here: http://sunmountainreviews.wordpress.com/2013/12/22/review-of-snow-fence-road/

Snow Fence Road: A village on the coast of Maine holds painful secrets—the kind only the miracle of new love can heal.

On the wings of the season

Kapelle, Ramsau – Photo: David Campell / GBC Tours
http://www.gbctours.com

Two years ago, I reconnected with Christmas in the place where its spirit first came to life for me. It flooded back in soul-delicious waves of experience that evoked my sweetest childhood memories.

Early on the morning of Dec. 6, St. Niklaus Day in much of Europe, I was up early in darkness to catch a train north from where I was staying near the Austrian border. I opened my hotel-room door to find a gift sack filled with an orange, apple, nuts in their shells, a tall chocolate “Christmas Man”, and other foil-wrapped chocolates. The night before, as I’d listened to bells tolling from a nearby church, I’d recalled finding my shoes filled just this way as a child. What angel had done this now?

Madonna, St. Lorenz Kirche, Nürnberg.

Between trains in Nürmberg a little later, I stood inside St. Lorenz Church captivated by the Madonna pictured here. The people of this city, situated at a crossroads on ancient trade routes, have a reputation for being at ease with the world, and with themselves, and a down-to-earth sensibility. This Mother and Child feel so real, for me, as they look into each other’s eyes. I love Mary’s expression, and the way cherubic Jesus is playing with his tiny foot, the way every baby does. In Germany, the story of the Christ child remains at the heart of Christmas, and this sculpture captures the heart of that, for me. Do click on the photo so you can see the full postcard-sized image. In fact, you get an even more intriguing view of the church above if you do the same.

In the streets outside, the city’s annual Christkindlmarkt had taken over the market square. Travel-writer Rick Steves recently filmed new additions to his television series there and has generously posted clips online. Have a look at this one, a delightful taste of Christmas in Germany, and learn about the Christkind angel, another beautiful part of the holiday traditions there: As Rick observes, it’s a sweet, metaphorical invitation to awareness when this golden angel tells children, “If you’re very, very gentle, you can touch my wings.”

Finally, just after sunset on December 24, I had the chance to remember why that iconic carol, “Stille Nacht”, means SILENT night. That is exactly what arrives as the day departs, the most enormous and beautiful silence. As I listened from my friends’ balcony, way up near the North Sea, it felt, on this night that begins the season of Christmas’s 12 days in Germany, as if everyone was home, in houses lit by golden candle light in soft darkness, and that all other activity had ceased.

Completely. In honor of the holy night.

Stille Nacht Memorial Chapel, Oberndorf bei Salzburg, Austria.

The genuine sound of silence. I remembered that Mother and Child, tender and mild, back in Nürmberg. Sleep in heavenly peace.

Renewal is the order of the day

Photo: Diane Kirkup

As the Winter Solstice arrives, I’m reminded of words of Pearl Buck’s:

“It is good to know our universe. What is new is only new to us.”

The newness of the season arriving now can be a quiet kind, and an invitation to quiet, and stillness. To waiting, and listening, in order to hear.

“Make Hay While the Moon Shines”, image by Lauren Chuslo-Shur.

Here in the northern hemisphere, the Solstice brings with it such a distinct meeting place of light and dark.

And yet, as with the sun’s gradually returning light, we can be warmed by the understanding that the forces at work in human life are drawing us away from a dark, centuries-old preoccupation with survival and “fighting evil” toward our highest destiny: a creative, collaborative and potentially limitless building of the good.

That is a prospect in which every one has a part to play and every culture unique contributions to make.

“Sunburst” image by Lauren Chuslo-Shur

Frederick Buechner expressed this reality beautifully: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

“Renewal is the order of the day,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá declared when he visited North America in 1912. “And all this newness hath its source in the fresh outpourings of wondrous grace and favor from the Lord of the Kingdom, which have renewed the world.

“The people, therefore, must be set completely free from their old patterns of thought, that all their attention may be focused upon these new principles, for these are the light of this time and the very spirit of this age.”

 

Created noble, to arise

Detail from painting “River of Life” by Diane Kirkup /
D. Kirkup Designs
http://www.etsy.com/shop/dkirkupdesigns

O Son of Spirit!

Noble have I created thee, yet thou hast abased thyself. Rise then unto that for which thou wast created.

~ Bahá’u’lláh

“Noble have I created thee” does not mean some of us, or most of us.

Or everyone except me. 

It means all of us.

“Pearls” by Lauren Chuslo-Shur.

The ways in which “honour and nobility” manifest themselves in us — each a unique creation of God — is a one-of-a-kind and wondrous journey.

Our human nature equips us for solving the challenges of the material world.

But that is where its powers, possibilities — and purpose — end.

It is our spiritual nature that enfolds the divine bestowals that bring forth the nobility and honour we’re created for.

What helps this nature become the decision-maker in our lives?

Are we ready, and willing, to embrace the truth that this inner reality is a presence and power in whose light all fear, and the trappings of mere survival, disappear like shadows?

Are we? 

Excerpted from:

With Thine Own Eyes: Why Imitate the Past When We Can Investigate Reality?, coming January 2014 from George Ronald Publisher:

http://grbooks.com/george-ronald-publisher-books/forthcoming/with-thine-own-eyes-1380638499

A story of pure gold

The golden answer to all that we seek, resides eternally in the Golden Rule.

Now a beautiful book for readers 3-8 – and hearts of all ages – explores its power in The Golden Friendship. This bright, colorfully illustrated story by New Hampshire writer and artist Lauren Chuslo-Shur follows the bumps that test the friendship between a Brazilian muriqui monkey and red-eyed tree frog and reveals the rewarding freedoms that acceptance and understanding always bring.

The story is supplemented with a list of thoughtful questions to maximize teachable moments about character and consequences, lively facts about the Brazilian rainforest and its animals, and instructions for how to craft the tissue-paper materials used to create the book’s delightful illustrations.

The Golden Friendship, published in hardcover, sells for $28 plus shipping and handling.

To order, E-mail author Lauren Chuslo-Shur at lcshur@comcast.net, or visit her Kensington Arts web site at: http://www.kensingtonartandcards.com/golden.html.

The food of heavenly illumination

Photo: Nelson Ashberger

Gleanings found here and there:

The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.  

~ William James 

Evolution is transformation. And transformation is happening all the time. It happens as we learn new things … Evolution is not an automatic ever-ascending spiritual conveyor-belt, but the result of our ability to face reality, adjust, adapt, and change. ~  Christine DeLorey

Photo: Nelson Ashberger

In recognizing yourself as life itself, you are put right-side up. You freshly live your life, rather than thinking it and then trying to live according to those thoughts. …The thinking mind becomes the servant — rather than the master — to the direct experience of life. ~ Gangaji

And finally, a blessing and prayer for every season:

Photo: Nelson Ashberger

O God! Dispel all those elements which are the cause of discord, and prepare for us all those things which are the cause of unity and accord! O God! Descend upon us Heavenly Fragrance and change this gathering into a gathering of Heaven! Grant to us every benefit and every food. Prepare for us the Food of Love! Give us the Food of Knowledge! Bestow on us the Food of Heavenly Illumination!      ~ ‘Abdu’l-Bahá