Category: Nature

Craig, Carter, and Compassion

On By AnnIn Earth care, Eldering, Family, Healing, History, Loss and GriefLeave a comment

Seventy-three years ago today, at 10:10 in the morning, a baby boy arrived in this world who would become a significant part of my life. Two decades later, I met Craig Winter in college at FHSU. We enjoyed traipsing around public parks and nature reserves in Kansas with our cameras, taking pictures of the wonders of nature. This morning I celebrated his life with a walk in the winter wonderland, taking a few pictures of the snow that fell overnight.

Craig and I were married in 1977, during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Having taken a class in the biology department at FHSU together–a class called “Can Man Survive?” that examined all the environmental issues of the day, including the greenhouse effect and global warming as climate change was called then–we were united in our commitment to support the natural world and reduce humanity’s harmful effects that were due to our unmitigated greed. Jimmy Carter was our guy. They say he was ahead of his time. I don’t think so. The probability of a global consequence to our short-sighted ravaging of our planet was known more than 100 years ago. Society knew all the benefits of alternative energy in the 60s and 70s. But harnessing free energy from the sun didn’t make any corporations much money. Craig and I were supporters of Carter’s conservation methods–turn down the winter thermostat, 55 mph speed limit, his installation of solar panels on the White House. And we dreamed of becoming reliant on our own private energy production, even then.

Carter acted with the well-being of his neighbors in mind, a true Christian quality. He wasn’t ahead of his time. The “resistance” at that time was just way behind. Look where that got us as they gained and assumed power.

Craig became a cancer statistic 9 days after his 33rd birthday in 1985, and I became a widow. (Quite the stigma for someone not yet 30 years old.) But I haven’t forgotten our joint priorities, nor our admiration for President Jimmy Carter.

Photo courtesy of The Carter Center.             Cuba 2002–The Carter Center’s delegation to Cuba, being the first time since the 1959 Revolution that a sitting or former president visited Cuba.

After his time in office ended, President Carter showed that you don’t have to be the elected leader of the country to make a huge difference, and today, a day after President Jimmy Carter’s funeral in Washington, DC, I renew my commitment to make a difference for those in my circle, for the inhabitants of Earth’s future, and for all the non-human neighbors that are as dependent on this planet as we are dependent on their well-being. Those of us with the future of our planet and its life forms in mind are now the “resistance.”

This morning, in honor of Craig Winter, I was trekking around our acreage in the fresh snow with my camera, capturing scenes, just like we used to do. Thinking of you Craigie, as I always do on this day. With love.

NOTE: I am deeply grateful and indebted to my second husband, Mike, for his generous and compassionate heart for the last 36 years. He has never objected to my memories or to my honoring people from my personal history that helped make me what I am today. We are all products of our histories and our memories, not just the stimuli we receive at the present time. Thank you for being dad to all our children, and grandpa to all our grandchildren as well as allowing my heart to grieve through the years.

To the Stars

On By AnnIn Healing, Nature, Prairie talesLeave a comment

I chased sunsets in my youth. Often, my mother would ride along as evening approached, and I drove to the west side of town. A favorite hilltop offered a spectacular unobstructed view of the evening sky. This was back in the day when color photography was off limits to many but I wanted to give it a try. My dad ran a black and white portrait studio in our basement when I was very young, and I’d help him nurse the images to life in the darkroom under our stairs. But color was a different story altogether. It was the next thing, a new generation of photo art, and I took what I had learned from him and launched into color printing in our basement laundry room—new town, new home.

In those days, I could purchase the developing chemicals at our local K-Mart, just up the street. I used a “Unicolor” system, with a plastic drum, that had channels for various sizes of prints, up to an 8 x 10. You were to expose the paper with your enlarger, using color filters for the proper mix of pigmentation, and then fit the paper into the drum, in the dark, and seal it with the press-on lid. From there, you could operate in daylight, pouring each designated chemical through the spout into and out of the drum at the prescribed times. At the end—wallah!—I removed my color prints.

Moonrise
Moonset

With our Kansas state motto, “Ad astra per aspera,” (to the stars through difficulties) it’s a logical pastime to watch the sky. Here in the western plains, often the sky provides the most intriguing scenery to be found. Some sunsets are stunning. And no two are alike. The interplay of light with moisture in the air, as well as dust at times, provide distractions from ordinary difficulties along with the continuously changing scenery. I don’t print color enlargements these days, but try to find images worthy of sharing in a digital format. New generation. Next thing.

I found myself sky-watching again after the election a month ago. The vistas overhead provided consistency through their constant metamorphosis and it was comforting. If not exactly ad astra per aspera, then at least ad caelum.

I will find something beautiful provided by Nature

On By AnnIn Eldering, Healing, Just for Today, Loss and Grief, Nature, Prairie talesLeave a comment

Last month I attended a few presentations at the Kansas Book Festival in Topeka. The one I remember most was by author and administrator at Haskell Indian Nations University Daniel R. Wildcat. I bought his book, On Indigenuity: Learning the Lessons of Mother Earth, a long essay on what indigenous peoples can teach the rest of us about protecting our miraculous home planet. I have long been concerned about protecting the home we share with all life forms, including people around the world and millions of other species. When greed and lust for power impact the lives of innocents around the world, I am enraged. Destruction of the biosphere that sustains us is now threatened with acceleration. Communities of wild things and minority populations will be the first to feel the impact.

In the early pages of his book, Daniel Wildcat recommended that we should become more familiar with Nature. One thing which compounds and complicates the rampant destruction of our planet is our distance from the elements. We sit inside our comfortable homes in front of screens far too much, and should become more familiar with how the natural world near us is impacted by our decisions and policies. To that end, today I decided I would walk the deer trails on my small patch of virgin tall grass prairie and look for the beauty in Nature. Even if you aren’t close to a 40-acre meadow, you can still take a walk and feel the fresh air and sunshine, listen to whatever birds are in the trees lining the streets, and enjoy the colors of autumn.

These scenes are from my morning walk today.

Sweetgum tree in our front yard, blazing orange.

A fallen Osage orange, with closely fitted puzzle-piece segments. No two alike. Just like people.

One of the two pine trees on our place, laden with pinecones. I keep wondering when the pine bark beetles will invade, but so far we’ve been lucky.

A backlit patch of little bluestem, with fluffs of seeds gleaming like a field of fallen stars.

One of my favorite grasses: Indian grass. The seedheads are still there, though they are far more impressive earlier in the autumn season. This reminds me of Native American writers that I admire, including Daniel Wildcat and Robin Wall Kimmerer. Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass changed my life during the Covid shutdown.

Tuned Up!

On By AnnIn Activism, bridges, faith, Family, Healing, Music and pianos, Nature, social justiceLeave a comment

My adventure at the mini-Chautauqua event sponsored by the Winfield Public Library through Humanities Kansas

For the last few months, a traveling Smithsonian exhibit has circulated around the state, setting up in six different cities, with one more to go. The Voices and Votes: Democracy in America exhibit has spent the last month at our local library and will soon travel on to Belleville in the northern tier of counties.

Each hosting community has featured something specific about how that location supported the sharing of information, citizen involvement, and the voting process.

Winfield’s focus was on the Chautauqua meetings of a hundred or more years ago.

Founded in 1874 in Lake Chautauqua, New York as an educational tool for adults, its original intent by founder Rev. Joh Heyl Vincent, a Methodist minister, and businessman Lewis Miller was to expand the idea of a Sunday School for adults. The idea soon grew until Chautauqua meetings became an important source of education, culture, recreation, and socialization for millions of Americans. Everyone was welcome.

Winfield’s Chautauqua events were held annually at the town’s iconic Island Park from 1887 to 1924. Some years, as many as 10,000 people flocked to the island, camping in an area reserved for family tents for a week to ten days. For a number of years, it ranked as the third most popular Chautauqua event in the nation.

The Winfield Public Library staff selected the historic Chautauqua events, with their focus toward education and giving people a platform to share ideas and opinions, as the local highlight for the Smithsonian exhibit. As part of that, a mini-Chautauqua was held last Sunday evening in the community building. Ten local citizens were invited to present short talks about “It’s Intense: Voices on Good Tension.” It was my honor to be included as one of those ten.

Other speakers included business managers, the newspaper publisher, a farmer, a county judge, city manager, physical therapist, and a retired activist teacher. The emcee shared a short bio for each of us. My presentation used images to focus on  metaphorical tension from the perspective of a professional piano tuner.

Bio: A young widow with a preschool daughter, Ann Fell came to Winfield 35 years ago to teach at Winfield High School. She met and married fellow teacher Mike Fell and with their combined resources they raised a blended family. After a few years she quit teaching and opened a regional piano service business. With the loss of her parents a few years ago, she returned to her early calling—writing—and now has six published books. A dedicated environmentalist, musician, grandmother, and writer, she is no stranger to life’s tensions. Here’s Ann to talk about keeping life Tuned Up!

A dictionary tells me that tension is the act of being stretched to stiffness, maintaining a balance between opposing forces.

As a piano tuner, it’s my job to adjust tension—over and over again.

All stringed instruments need tuning as well,

but with 88 keys in a piano and multiple strings for most keys there are around 225 strings to tune.

With an average 160 pounds of tension per string, that gives an ordinary piano about 18 tons of tension across its plate–30 tons for a concert grand. That’s a lot of tension! Believe it or not, I spend half the year lowering tension, and half the year raising it, since wooden soundboards react to our seasonal humidity changes.

If a string is stretched too tight, it can break. On the other hand, if it doesn’t have enough tension and is limp it will not vibrate with the desired pitch. It will not sing.

It’s all about balance.

In our lives, tension just happens, and we stretch between opposing forces. Some of those forces relate to daily family interactions,

disagreements between parents about children,  disagreements between children and their parents. I might find myself facing a troubling medical diagnosis, or watching financial reserves dribble away.

I might have opposing opinions about current issues with extended family. I might be asked by our amazing local librarians to prepare a 5 minute presentation about Good Tension. I might face major life changes like starting a new job or moving to another community.

I might find myself dealing with tragic loss and grief, balancing the emptiness of the future with joyous memories.

How do I find the optimum balance for tension in life? In the piano tuning world, we have special tools.

But what about tools to balance life tension?

Nothing as concrete as tools I’d find in the kitchen or garden.

What tools are good for tense life situations?

I suggest intrinsic ones, habits, and careful choices.

Perhaps many of us have identified passions in our lives,

answering questions like “Who am I?”

and “Why am I here?” Hopefully most of our passions will leave a better place for those who come after us.

The details can be different for everyone, but we find a cause that we can support.

Maybe two or three.

When it’s time to raise the pitch—to increase tension and produce harmony—I find ways to follow my passions and take a stand on issues of the day,

to engage in life, to volunteer, befriend someone who needs a friend.

I try to recognize those things that I can let go and those I will support in every way I can think of.

But what can I do when the weather changes and I sense a storm coming? How do I keep from breaking under tension? Tools to relieve tension arrive as life gifts, different for everyone.

Some may go for a run or a bike ride.

Others grab a book to escape to an imaginary world, or write in a journal. Some people make music.

I like to take a camera and look for beauty in the world around me. And the world responds.

Some things I have learned:

Life is complicated—there is nothing simple about it.

Acknowledgement of mistakes helps build bridges.

Love is the greatest power.

Laughter heals.

At least half of communication involves listening.

There is beauty and wisdom in tiny things and overlooked places. It’s healing to find wonder in miniature worlds.

I always find what I’m looking for, so I try to look for the positives.

When the future looms dim, I hold fast to my values, and take one small thing at a time.

Bird by bird, scene by scene, note by note, day by day or even minute by minute, I can make choices that support my values.

Like a seed, sprouting under dire conditions, but sprouting anyway. That is the essence of optimism.

Danielle Orner, a young woman who has battled cancer since she was a teenager said, “Life is a balance between what we can control and what we cannot.”

Between effort and surrender—two forces in life that keep us in tune. That is the essence of good tension, insuring that those yet to come can sing.

(P.S. To answer your question: I should add photographer to my list of dedicated endeavors in the above bio. Yes, I took all the photos, except for those in which I appear, and the group of Haitian children.)

Firestorm Sonata: The Story Behind the Story

On By AnnIn books, Earth care, fiction, Firestorm Sonata, novels, Prairie tales, WritingLeave a comment

The third novel in my Sonata series of adventure tales featuring pianos and their families is now available on Amazon. I have mixed feelings about it. The completion of this journey has been months in the making and I’m relieved to finally get there. It’s been a lot of hard work, with repeated readings and editing through the summer, each time thinking this would be it, and each time finding more things that needed to change. I finally drew a line. This is it. Ready or not. And Firestorm is launched. May she find a path through the maze of words out there in the cyberverse and not disappoint.

Firestorm Sonata:

In peak condition, scout Sharenda Kamine is certain her field skills will insure her safety as she seeks supplies needed by the fortress she calls home. She must, however, prove her worth to the authoritarian commander of this isolated pocket of survivors. With reluctance, he grants her request to work alone and she heads across dust dunes of what once was southern Kansas, confident she will master any challenge she meets. But she is unprepared to find a window into the past, which simultaneously offers a future ripe with possibilities. She must decide whether she will honor her commitment to the Fort, or escape to freedom with Gran, the only family she knows.

This tale is a first for me, to set the events in the future. During my work on the second Sonata, Sonata of Elsie Lenore, a friend I respect, a retired college professor and elder in my community, shared an article with me. “Confronting the Climate Crisis Through Fiction: Visualizing a climate-ravaged world may actually be the key to mobilizing action.” Those who know me well know my passion for the natural world, for the planet Earth. As a college freshman 50 years ago—get that FIFTY—I took a life-changing class called “Can Man Survive?” in the biology department at Fort Hays State University in Kansas. It was based on the then-current knowledge about all the impacts our human activities had on water, air, land—and climate. We’ve known about greenhouse gasses for my entire life. Even longer. Some folks predicted serious impacts early in the industrial revolution, over a hundred years ago.

The evidence is mounting in 2023. This summer is already setting records. Extreme weather events around the world fill the news from catastrophic flooding to record-setting temperatures and untamable fires. Chile, Canada, Greece, Italy, China, India, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Sudan, Madagascar, Zimbabwe–the list goes on. In North America, water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico hit 100+ in places, with 100% mortality in some coral reefs.

My own community cleans up after a straight-line windstorm that downed whole trees in our favorite parks and city streets, demolished our neighbor’s hay storage barn, and wreaked havoc on the county fair. Cleanup will continue for weeks. The cost has soared toward $2,000,000 already in our one small town.  And yet, we humans continue a path deemed to be disastrous for all life on the planet, just so oil companies can reap growing mega-profits at the expense of everything else we hold dear. If fictional tales set in a grim future environment will shake us into action, I decided I must try.

It’s been my privilege to offer continued piano service across south-central Kansas for nearly thirty years. I’ve kept climate records at each job, recording temperature and humidity. It’s increasingly hard to advise piano owners what their best plan of service should be. With seasonal swings in temperature and humidity becoming more unpredictable, the effects on pianos are easy to see. Tuning stability is now a figment of the imagination.

Pianos are my world. So is the prairie ecosystem. I began to ask some hard questions as I twisted those pins on my annual calls. “What’s with all the earthquakes in Kansas and Oklahoma?” In my college geology classes I learned this area is the “stable” part of the continent. Earthquakes are supposed to be extremely rare. And yet here we are.

“What about the wildfires?” Every year we hear about more extreme fires. California, Oregon, Texas, Idaho. There have been successive record-breaking fires that started in Oklahoma and raged across the state line into Kansas, burning hundreds of thousands of grass acres, killing animals (including livestock) that were trapped in its path.April 2016, a fire burned over 400,000 acres, the largest blaze ever in Kansas (at the time);  March 2017, 600,000 acres burned in southwest Kansas, people were evacuated from small towns in the area; December 2021—fires in northwest Kansas, fanned by winds stronger than hurricane force, burned 400,000 acres.

Then there were the Canadian fires this summer that burned for weeks, sending ash and smoke into the air across northern US. And Maui—MAUI?? An island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with a drought and a spark? The death toll from the Maui fire continues to grow.

I tried to imagine what my home county would look like after an extended drought, followed by a massive firestorm. Perhaps lightning would ignite an oil spill created by one of those fracking earthquakes. Add to the mix technology that can’t receive satellite signals, towers that topple in storms, and no way to receive news from the rest of the world.

The field of stepping stones.

What would my piano family do? What would become of them and their pianos? Would it even matter anymore if basic survival was the most pressing need? Unfortunately basic survival is already the most pressing need for far too many of Earth’s creatures, including pockets of human beings.

Thus, Firestorm Sonata was born. My deepest thanks to everyone who begged for another tale, who listened when I felt discouraged, and who offered words that bolstered me to keep on writing. You all comprise the village which raised Firestorm Sonata from a small seed to fruition. May she have wings to take her beyond my imagination and in her own way make our planet and our future a little brighter for all living things.

 

Of Snow and Violins

On By AnnIn books, children's books, Earth care, fiction1 Comment

I don’t recall a time when I didn’t love books. I must have been hooked at my first page in my first picture book. Naturally, I wanted to write them also. English class in Junior High expanded my love of language. When the home economics teacher there assigned everyone to write a picture book for preschool children, a passion was born. I embarked on a lifelong adventure with words.

Though there have been lengthy gaps when I was too involved with family matters to spend time with a pen and typewriter, whenever I could  I outlined projects, made deadlines for myself, subscribed to writing magazines, and submitted my work.

One early project started with a dream.  I don’t recall my age when this dream seared itself into my subconscious, but upon recollection it was an outlandish and delightful story. In my young adulthood, married but BC (before children) I decided to write the dream story as a picture book. It involved a couple of seals and a polar bear in the Arctic, a snowman, and a violin. A violin you ask? Yes. A violin.

Not skilled with paint or colored pencils, I figured I could illustrate this Arctic story using my photographic skills. I needed only to make the characters. I designed patterns to sew stuffed animals as well as stuffed snowmen and a violin. After careful construction, I lined up the cast on a board covered with quilt batting sprinkled with glitter, set up my trusty OM-1 35mm SLR on a tripod, and headed into the morning sunshine outside the little farmhouse we rented in Morton County, Kansas.

Crowned with a bluer-than-blue sky, the still morning was perfect for the illustrative slides. I had a blast moving the characters through the plot and snapping photos of every scene. When the slides returned from the processor, I had the story and the illustrations. I submitted the idea and samples to a few children’s book publishers, and received their kind rejections. I eventually chose Plan B and took the collection of stuffed animals, a slide projector, screen, and the story to several local libraries as a guest reader for their children’s story times. Again, I had a blast and the kids enjoyed hands-on time with the characters from the story.

The years raced by. Life happened. My own children arrived. Daily routines became strictly regimented trying to keep up with everyone’s activities. Other than a session or two sharing the story with my own kids, the stuffed characters were stored away in a big plastic tub until last December.

As Christmas approached last year, I recognized there was no good reason to hide the stuffed animals away. My daughters were grown with children of their own—and half of the grandkids were already too old for picture books. Either I pull the old critters out of the closet, or I never would. I gifted a couple to my 6-year-old granddaughter for Christmas and took along the set of photos to read her the story. On our homeward journey I realized that I now had the means to publish A Very Special Snowman myself. After digitizing the illustrations and formatting a children’s book, I sent this same granddaughter her very own copy of the book featuring the Arctic characters for her 7th birthday in March.

I launched the decades-old project to the public Thursday April 20. The “Women Score Higher” conference in Wichita solicited women authors as vendors and I was happy to be able to bring a variety of books for many different readers, including the freshly published A Very Special Snowman.

A few days after 7-year-old Mia received her book in the mail, her 9-year-old sister wrote to me saying she was writing a book and wanted to know how to publish it. It makes a grandmother proud.

Even with a peaceful ending for two careless seal pups, A Very Special Snowman is a little sad for me. Since those days of innocence long ago, the emergency situation in the Arctic has escalated as our warming Earth melts the polar ice. The fate of Arctic animals like polar bears and seals has taken a perilous turn since my early writing years.

But every stage of this project has been a thrill for me—from the dream, to construction of the characters, to photographing the scenes, telling the story, and designing a book in 2023. And the piercing blue sky in the photos of 1979 amazes me still, a reminder that this precious planet is very much worth defending for all of us, polar bears and seals included.

 

 

Who Do You Trust?

On By AnnIn Activism, Earth careLeave a comment

Steady . . . 

A dear friend, one of my first writing companions from decades ago, recently asked, “Are you better off than you were two years ago?”

I have given it some thought, and my answer is this: I think we are all better off now than we were when Donald Trump was in the White House.

Are things perfect? No. When are they ever? But with leaders who will tackle problems that will help make life better for all the people rather than their  billionaire friends, there is hope. And I want to preserve that in our country’s leadership.

I find it sad that many of my friends and neighbors have been pulled in by the lies fed to us continually by the former president and his supporters. My friend sent me a link to a speech by someone she trusts, an online Reverend who has a YouTube channel. I googled his name and ended up with a lot of red flags. I don’t see myself trusting him. With all the extreme rhetoric on many topics, how do you trust anyone?

I lean more toward someone like Dan Rather and his comments on Steady. As news anchor on CBS for much of my life, Dan Rather has covered a lot of  topics in the past five decades. He’s from my parents’ generation and I respect the perspective on history the elders have. Like others I hold in high esteem in his generation, Dan Rather has never seen anything as troubling for our country as Donald Trump’s leadership.

From a recent post on his Steady website, ( https://steady.substack.com ):

“Let us not pretend everything is okay.”

“Let us not give up hope.”

“Let us not minimize the problems before us.”

“Let us not deny reality.”

“Let us not demonize one another.”

“We are facing a midterm election in which everything feels like it is at stake. And indeed it is.”

It’s tempting to raise my hands in despair, thinking that all is already lost. But we can’t afford that. The keynote speaker at the recent convention for the Kansas Authors Club mentioned it’s okay to keep trying, even if you don’t know whether you’ll ever succeed. Not knowing doesn’t relieve us of the obligation to try.

And we can’t stop trying to make a better world for our descendants. It is our obligation for the future.

Electing politicians who will negate the results of the next election they don’t like will be disastrous to everything we hold dear,  even the future of our home planet.

Now is the time to get out the vote. Let’s not sit this one out, friends.

From Alpha . . . to Omega Part 2

On By AnnIn Earth care, faith, Family, Loss and Grief, Nature1 Comment

Since I was young, I found peace and unconditional acceptance in the natural world, even in difficult times. Especially in difficult times. During a traumatic adolescence, I surrounded myself with nature in my hideaway room at home. There was a fifty-gallon aquarium, and shelves in the windows filled with houseplants. Some even vined across the ceiling. My own private forest.

In Nature, I found evidence of a supreme being beyond what our senses show. Through countless moments filled with awe and wonder at the mystery of life, of connections with other beings, I grew to love the Earth, its life, and its mysteries. As we approach a precipice of no-return in the global crisis brought on by our industrial and consumer-oriented lifestyle, I feel great sadness, along with deep gratitude for the gift of life itself, and for all the moments when I sense the Beyond through simple contacts with other living things. Climate grief is a true thing.

I wonder what awe-filled moments do you recall that you wish your grandchildren—and theirs—could experience?

Have you ever . . .

Watched an eagle soar and listened to its distant call?

Sat on a trailside boulder and watched an aspen seed float to the ground?

Had a hummingbird check your red bandanna for nectar?

Watched a glacier calve an iceberg?

Heard a rush of wings in the stillness of a heavy mist?

Watched a loggerheaded shrike hang a field mouse on a locust thorn?

Risen before dawn to visit booming grounds of lesser prairie chickens?

 

Watched a lone prairie dog scamper away from its village into the sunset?

Surprised a family of deer on a winter walk?

Watched a flock of robins sip melting snow from your house gutters?

Walked with a flashlight after dark in September to watch orb spiders at work?

Witnessed a black bear check out the milo fields on the high plains of Kansas?

Heard the scream of a cougar outside your tent in the middle of the night?

Watched autumn leaves dance with hundreds of migrating monarch butterflies at dusk?

Held a newly metamorphosed moth in your hand and watched its virgin flight?

Heard barking sea lions as they congregated on the shore below the seaside cliff where you stood?

Through six decades, travels from Oregon and California to Maryland and Florida, Minnesota to Arizona, as well as journeys to Japan, India, Hawaii, Canada, Alaska, Cuba, and Mexico—not to mention my own backyard—the wonderments of Earth have held me spellbound in every little nook. With deep gratitude for all I have been fortunate to witness, and with fervent hope that we can stop our catapult into disaster at COP26, I offer Part 2 of the slide show from my younger days. Let humanity not be responsible for the Omega curtain on our gem of a planet.

Music: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor, “Chorale Symphony.”

 

From Alpha . . . to Omega

On By AnnIn Earth care, faith, Family, NatureLeave a comment

A week from today in Glasgow, Scotland, COP26 is set to begin. The 26th Conference of the Parties (COP) of the 1994 United Nations treaty on Climate Change has been called the planet’s last best chance to establish commitments around the globe that will mitigate the worst consequences of human blundering and greed. Glasgow, a Global Green City with plans to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030, is an appropriate location for the conference. Like Greta Thunberg, I have grave doubts that anything pertinent will come from the proceedings.

But, it’s crucial that we take drastic steps to reverse the damage humanity has done to this gem of a planet. Every culture and faith tradition that I know of dictates great honor and respect for the forces that created the living biosphere we call home and rely on for our very existence. My background is the Christian tradition, where in earliest stories, God the divine, the Creator, brought into being the systems on Earth—and saw that it was very good.

Grand Canyon, Arizona

The greatest crime against the universe is human arrogance and greed that ignores the rest of our brother and sister species to bring about catastrophic change and ultimately destruction of the Earth systems that support all life forms.

I fell in love with nature in my childhood. My parents took us traveling to wonderful places every year and we camped in the wilderness before RV-ing became a “thing.” The church were I learned “God is Love” used beautiful scenic photos on the weekly bulletins, and I wanted to take photos like them.

In college, my best friend (who later became my husband) and I bonded over escapades in natural settings. We reveled in outings where we traipsed joyfully through hills and meadows with our 35mm SLR cameras slung over our shoulders.

The first church we attended as newlyweds was a country Mennonite church in southwestern Kansas. Though neither of us had a Mennonite background, the love, the service, and the music of this congregation provided a perfect support for beginning our married life. For these people, we put together a slide show of our own scenic shots, accompanied by scripture from the Bible. The original show was held in 1978 in a local auditorium, using a Kodak carousel projector and reading scripture at a microphone as we advanced the slides. At the time we thought how nice it would have been to include musical background, but lacked technological skills to accomplish that.

I lost my first soul mate to cancer. A lifetime later, with advancing digital products and home computers, I was able to convert the original 35mm slides to digital format, set it all to music with the help of a tech-savvy stepson, and post to a YouTube video channel.

I offer the show here, for love of the Earth, of Creation, of our gem of a planet which unquestionably deserves better than we’ve allotted to it. As COP26 approaches, can we all agree that Earth is unique in the universe? Can we, out of respect for its Creator and Creation itself, and for love of generations to come—generations of all species that make up our Earth family—commit to protecting and preserving this unique planet which holds mystery and miracles and wondrous splendor?

See Part 1 of the slide show we called “In the Beginning” here, set to Beethoven’s Egmont Overture in F minor op. 84:

Part 2 to come.

What’s a Grandma to do?

On By AnnIn Activism, Earth careLeave a comment

With the preponderance of plastic items everywhere you turn, it’s a real challenge to figure out how to reduce my use. Take, for instance, the celebratory picnic of grandson’s swim team season two weeks ago. Hotdogs and hamburgers would be furnished, but each family was to bring along “prepackaged” sides to make the meal complete. Prepackaged? I visualized single serving chip bags, plastic containers of fruit or pudding, industrial cookies and brownies, wrapped and sealed in plastic before packaging in paperboard boxes.

How to reduce my family’s plastic contribution?

Here’s what I decided to do. I baked a batch of home-made oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips, and put one cookie each inside a single paper sleeve.

I had found a supply of these online when preparing a promotion of Grandma Georgia’s Recipe File at an old-time crafts festival.

Then I cleaned and sanitized 24 small plastic cups that included plastic lids, which came with the free USDA summer lunches provided during COVID for the grandson. I selected ripe and attractive grapes, chunks of melon, and a bing cherry, and made two dozen fresh fruit cups. I sealed them with the cleaned lids. Okay, I know. This was still in plastic, but at least it was re-used plastic before it was tossed into the trash bins.

(Fruit cups similar to the picnic items. I forgot to take a picture of those.)

This reducing plastic thing is hard. It’s everywhere, and we’re so used to it, we don’t even think about it anymore.