Dear all,
I’ve been harvesting bounty from my little community garden plot, and spent much of yesterday working at the urban farm that I love. I have also continued to find ways to support young people who are working with Sunrise, the youth climate movement, which has been deeply satisfying. There are many things to be thankful for.
I’ve also found myself in the midst of conflict in a variety of situations. I hate conflict, but try to remember that molecules move more readily in a heated situation—that it creates potential for change. And the direction I’m holding for myself is to just show up, as fully and as fully myself as I know how.
As we move past the longest day of the year, I wish you well in this new season.
Love,
Pamela
Hemlock and larch
A tiny insect is threatening our hemlock forests. We can’t see the signs of damage yet in the place we love up in northern Pennsylvania, but a friend pulled off a hemlock twig and put it under a microscope, and there they were.
I love the hemlocks. I love the feeling of moving from an open meadow into the hemlock forest, how from one step to the next you enter a different world, cool and shady and quiet. I love the soft flatness of the needles and the tiny little cones. Years ago, I dug little hemlock volunteers from the side of the road to plant as a screen against a field of briars. Now they are thirty feet tall.
It’s hard to imagine that the forest might be destroyed. Yet I know the power of many small insects. A plague of gypsy moths, three years running, decimated the maples in the woods. Many died. Others took years to come back to health.
There are poisons that can be applied to individual trees, and limited pricey supplies of a new predator beetle. But we’re talking about a whole forest. As I wonder what I can do, my mind turns to the beautiful larches by the pond—those conifers that lose their needles in the winter. I look around for their babies, thinking perhaps I can transplant them as I did the little hemlocks all those years ago, but can find none. A little research lets me know that they don’t grow much from seed; if you want to propagate larch, it is best done through cuttings.
I take those instructions with me the next time we visit. Early one morning, with the mist rising up off the pond, I carefully clip six inch bits off the ends of branches, and wrap them in a moist paper towel to take home. They live in my refrigerator till I can get to the garden supply place for a rooting hormone and potting mixture.
They are out of rooting hormone. What can I do? Thankfully the woman who works there is resourceful. She says you just need something that’s anti-fungal. Honey will do, or cinnamon. Cinnamon is probably best. We look for a potting mixture. They don’t sell peat any more, since the peat bogs are being over-harvested. But we find an organic alternative—made of aged forest products, coconut hulls, rice husks and worm castings. I hold the bag to my heart as I make my way home on the trolley.
That evening I wash the plastic pots. Usually I wouldn’t bother, but I want to do my best by these little larch cuttings. The potting mixture seems moist and friendly as I fill the pots. I carefully strip off the bottom needles, use a little rubbing alcohol to sterilize the end, dip it in cinnamon, shake off the extra and gently poke it into a pot. Twenty-four times. Twenty-four little larch cuttings, beautifully green and hopeful. I water, and arrange them on my wide kitchen window sill to avoid direct sunlight, as the directions say.
Next morning, and the morning after that, I come downstairs to a little larch forest on my window sill. They still look healthy. I don’t know if all, or some, or any of the cuttings will survive. If they do, I don’t know if I can successfully transplant them up there at the edge of the hemlock forest.
Yet they have been surrounded by love—those clear careful instructions, my early morning walk among the big larches with the mist rising from the pond, the woman who took the time to look up the powers of cinnamon and wished me well, the people who made that lovely potting mixture, with all its contributions from forest, field and soil.
Considering the threat to the forest, this is a small thing, perhaps not the best thing, but something. It’s good that others are working on bigger solutions, and opportunities to join them may open up. But we don’t have to wait. We all can love, and act on that love in ways that are within our grasp. And if it is not enough, we will still have acted in love, and that love will carry us through.
Tuesday morning
The shabby room
in the corner church
is packed this Tuesday morning.
Neighbors of all conditions
pregnant women, dads and toddlers
elders with canes
all waiting patiently
to exercise their democratic right
to vote.
Not the whole of democracy for sure—
our voices needed everywhere.
Yet, tainted by corruption,
bought and sold,
under attack,
it’s still a role to cherish and defend.
Neighborly civility prevails,
fathers speak of why we’re here
in words a three-year-old can understand,
and so we wait,
holding fast to this, our sacred right.
Dare to Imagine—A new economy is possible!
Postal Banking
With 68 million people in the US lacking access to adequate banking opportunities, the idea of having the US Postal Service engage in basic banking services has risen again. The Postal Service already cashes Treasury checks and issues money orders. It has statutory authority to offer ATMs, paycheck cashing, bill payment and electronic money transfers in post offices.
This is not a new idea. From 1911 to 1967, the Postal Service maintained its own banking system, allowing citizens to open small savings accounts at local post offices. At the end of World War II, it had a balance of $3 billion, roughly $30 billion in today’s dollars. Congress did away with postal banking in the 1960s, but post offices in other countries—including Japan, Germany, China, and South Korea—provide banking services. Japan Post Bank is consistently ranked as one of the world’s largest financial institutions based on assets.
https://www.thenation.com/article/aoc-bernie-sanders-postal-banking-sean-hannity-john-nichols
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
The San Francisco D.A. has unveiled program aimed at removing implicit bias from prosecutions by removing racial data from initial documents. https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-san-francisco-da-prosecutions-implicit-bias-software-20190612-story.html
New York City realtors have lost their grip on the state legislature, which has significantly reined in their power, giving tenants a fairer deal. https://inequality.org/great-divide/in-new-york-and-beyond-our-plutocrats-may-need-a-new-playbook/
Dads who are finding their role in encouraging young children to read. https://www.facebook.com/6abcActionNews/videos/vb.9335481377/2365107793547204/?type=2&theater
Rural populists, seeing that native tribes can more effectively guard their local economies from large corporations than their state, local or federal governments, are joining “Cowboy-Indian” alliances to protect the land and waters of the place they all call home. https://wagingnonviolence.org/2019/05/populist-alliances-of-cowboys-and-indians-are-protecting-rural-lands/
Resources
Money, Debt and Liberation
A video of a talk I gave at Pendle Hill in January, 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7nP8eJ5vy8
Money and Soul
A transcript of a keynote address I delivered at a Quaker conference in New Mexico, June 2017
https://westernfriend.org/media/money-and-soul-unabridged
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance
A book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
More resources
www.findingsteadyground.org
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)
Pamela Haines
215-349-9428
The hope is always here, always alive, but only your fierce caring can fan it into a fire to warm the world.
-Susan Cooper
www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
