Category: environment, activism, localizing, Transition Movement

You can buy sourdough starter, but the best way to get it is from a friend because it will always come with its own story. I wrote here nearly a year ago about my mother’s adventures with sourdough ‘mother,’ a gift from her Ukrainian-Canadian friend. History repeated itself for me, when I got my own pint of sourdough from a friend who cultured it himself from flour, water, and patience. The existence of sourdough is further proof that we share a world with mutually-beneficial species, and with some effort we can be in right relationship with them. In this case, wild yeast.

The newcomer to my household has proven itself a resilient culture indeed, a friendly upstart that has changed how we make, enjoy, and think about bread, in our family. In short, over the past year, I have been baking a loaf or two EVERY WEEK, except for when we were away for six weeks last summer. With some trepidation, I put a cup of recently fed starter (it ‘eats’ just water and flour) into a recycled Talenti gelato jar, screwed on the lid, popped it into the freezer, and crossed my fingers. Fortunately, there wasn’t a power outage kind of hurricane event in 2019. All I had to do on my return was let it thaw, feed it for a few days, and we were back in business.

There are probably hundreds of recipes for sourdough on the Internet, and based on my sample of only those designated ‘easy’ and ‘beginners,’ every one of them is likely to frustrate the hell out of you if you’re a stickler for consistent results. So, count on a lesson — or three — in patience (a first rising can be 4 hours or 12).

We have another newcomer in neighborhood, a single, good-looking young man who replaced the family with the three noisy dogs we were glad to see go. And it turns out, our new neighbor was born in Ukraine. When you have a common wall and adjacent driveways, a certain amount of intimacy is inevitable if not always welcome. I already had a good feeling about him, though, because one day while we were away, he heard our daughter on the patio, audibly grieving her recently deceased father, and came over to make sure she was all right. This was a breach of protocol in our mind-your-business kind of neighborhood for which I am grateful.

My relationship with sourdough starter has taught me that is has no respect for your schedule, so get used to that. If you’re a control freak, you’ll be sorely tested. Things that influence ‘mother’ and therefore how your bread turns out include, of course, the quality of the water and flour you use to feed the culture; whether you let it warm up and expand enough before starting your recipe; the ambient temperature of your kitchen, the humidity, even your mood (i.e. cool or warm hands) and possibly the kind of music you’re playing in the background. Mine seems to like The Eagles and Van Morrison. I’ve had whole wheat loaves turn out so pretty I photograph them. Others that look like, and have the airy consistency of, an oversize English crumpet. But here’s the thing. Regardless of how a loaf looks, no one in my family has turned down a slice. We have almost forgotten what bread from a commercial source tastes like. We’re becoming connoisseurs of the distinctive tang that gives sourdough its name.

So the other night, we took this promising start a little further and invited O. to dinner. He rang the doorbell one minute after 6:30, wow! Dark, well-barbered hair, neat beard, wearing a tight black tee that showed his muscles, and dark jeans. He put his bottle of wine on the dining table, and shook my hand with a slight nod of his head.

Right away, he noticed our keyboard and ukuleles hanging on the wall and asked if we were musicians. I welcome curiosity and interest like this, so I ‘introduced’ him to the rest of our family via the group of photos under the hanging instruments. Our cat seemed to take to the stranger as well, rubbing against his legs and submitting to some strokes. Meanwhile, wine was being uncorked and poured, the Camembert I had remembered to take out hours ahead, was sagging nicely on the cheese platter next to the basket of crackers. I had made a salad earlier and had only the pasta to toss before serving. The evening was launched.

We chatted easily about our backgrounds, like neighbors who are interested in getting off to a good start do. He asked if we socialized with others in the complex and we mentioned the chili cook-off a few weeks back. The truth is, with the exception of dog-walkers and young families, most people are polite enough, but generally keep to themselves.

Turns out O. was born in Ukraine when it was still part of the Soviet Union and came to the United States at age 14 with his mother. His parents had been long divorced. He speaks English without an accent and is fluent in Russian, Ukraine, and the language of computer science in which he has a degree. He had been here 25 years, with a stint at UF Gainesville before getting a degree at Eckerd. He designs websites and codes, and intends to be his own boss eventually.

Given how much his former country had been in the news, I hesitated to talk politics. But – and I’m not sure how this happened – somehow we got there, and it turned out our views were aligned. Two hours passed quickly and pleasantly. The food was evidently enjoyed. He had a late date but insisted on helping clear up the dishes. My mother would have called O. ‘well-brought up.’  Soon, it was time to say good night. He would like to cook for us, he said. When he does, I’ll bring him a loaf of sourdough and a story.  

There’s a little poster pasted to our kitchen wall: Kindness Begets Kindness. It was a gift from its maker who was a speaker at a Secular Humanist breakfast. I don’t remember her name or the subject of her talk that morning, only her kind eyes and smile whenever I look at the poster.

Generosity also begets generosity. In the world I want to live in and pass on to my heirs, these are fundamental principles. Stephen Cope, one of my favorite yoga teachers, offered this exercise as an antidote to despair. Lie on your back and relax your body. Let yourself remember the benefactors in your life. Picture their faces, hear their voices, try to recall in some detail the circumstances in which they helped you, something they said or did or made possible, that caused you to feel — and be — better in some way. It’s a powerfully grounding practice.

I have known the artist, Beju Lejobart, and his wife, Sherryl Muriente, for 5 or 6 years. We met after a reader of this blog passed the link along to her, and she reached out. She, teaching urban design at Florida Atlantic University at the time, was interested in the Transition Movement, recognizing a certain kinship between its core ideas and her work with, and passion for, urban acupuncture. In case it is unfamiliar, urban acupuncture is “… using small-scale interventions to transform the larger urban context…Just as the practice of acupuncture is aimed at relieving stress in the human body, the goal of urban acupuncture is to relieve stress in the built environment.” Source Wikipedia

Sherryl and Beju began attending monthly Transition meetings at the Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, a city we didn’t call home, but with the help of resident, the late Dean Sherwin, recognized as having many of the small town attributes upon which a self-sufficient, localized, energy-conserving economy could be constructed.

Dean and his spouse, Susan, had been members of Transition Media (Pennsylvania) before moving to Lake Worth, and as members of the Meeting House, were providing our group with both the space in which to meet (for voluntary donations) and their ideas and first-hand experience. Dean was an expert in energy efficiency. Our monthly potlucks drew people interested in permaculture, solar energy, the arts in service of climate activism, simplicity, home-schooling, and home-steading, bee-keeping, to name a few. My interest was pop-up community gardens, in unused urban or suburban plots – a kind of mini urban acupuncture, if you will.

Sherryl’s project, C’est La Via, click here, was a good fit with Transition principles, and many of us were happy to volunteer in a happy, cross-pollination. Many movements for social change start out with extreme generosity of this kind.

A year or so later, in 2015, I am a founding member of Women Aloud, a troupe of women who came together to perform The Vagina Monologues and decided we wanted to keep doing this stuff: have fun and raise funds for women’s causes. Beju volunteered to video tape our second production, a collection of monologues we called, You Can’t Say That! Though we had not worked together for awhile though still “rowing in the same direction” (as Sherryl put it), he was back in my world, donating his services as videographer for yet another show, this one in partnership with Emergency Medical Assistance, an abortion funder, called Hear Us: Our Stories of Abortion.

Although social media had kept us somewhat in touch, we decided it had been too long since we sat down to a meal and shared what mattered to us. That was how we two couples crammed ourselves into a booth at Malakor in the Northwood section of West Palm Beach, talking and laughing over steamed dumplings and nam sod, a delectable spicy, cold salad. In the meantime, Beju’s art has taken off, see www.Dudali.com (Dudali® is a registered Trademark.) Sherryl has become Manager of Urban Placemaking, WPB Downtown Development Authority. None of us had lost our enthusiasm for the arts, community-building, and whistling while we work. Before our 2-hour lunch was over, we had discovered a number of possible future collaborations. Dare I say, stay tuned.

Let me sign off this post after a longish hiatus from blogging, on this note. It has become a lot more difficult of late to be hopeful about our future as a thriving species on a healthy planet. Yet I choose to live as if kindness and generosity beget more of the same. The alternative is not worth considering.

Being Slow means that you control the rhythms of your own life.  ~ Carlo Petrini, Slow Food Founder

As life lessons go, a car wreck on a highway notorious for its fatalities is perhaps among the most life-altering.  Even before a speeding sedan and concrete highway divider interrupted what started out as a normal morning’s drive home from an overnight in Miami, I was feeling a nagging desire to control the rhythms of my life better.  I will be 75 this fall, an age when many of my peers are busy checking exotic destinations off their bucket list.  I wanted exactly the opposite: to travel less, be more selective about how and with whom I spent time.  Now, I would perforce have that opportunity.

Almost every day the local paper brings a grim reminder of how fortunate we were that Sunday morning: the airbags deployed, the seat belts prevented head injuries, we were both healthy and fit, and a trio of young people, heading home to Georgia, pulled over to gently assist two injured and confused old people from their wrecked Honda Civic, and call 911.  Whiplash is a nasty, nagging injury, and a broken collarbone disabling.  But we could and did recover.  “You’re lucky,” the ER staff kept saying as they took vital signs, hooked up the IV, ordered X-Rays, a CAT scan. At the end of that day in a noisy, crowded ER, we got to go home, with a sling for my arm and pain prescription.

Impossible to imagine how we would have gotten through the first weeks without the help of our adult children and many generous friends.  Police reports and insurance paperwork, dealing with a junked car, wait for no one.  Prepared meals, groceries, laundry, a ride to the orthopedic center, were all cheerfully provided so we didn’t need to drive until we were ready.  Never, I remember thinking at a low point.  Is never soon enough?  With little discussion, we decided against replacing the Honda, and turned down the rental to which our insurance policy entitled us. For at least a month, while I took a leave of absence from my yoga teaching and my spouse from his gig, playing piano at a retirement community, we were living the ultimate slow down mantra from my yoga teacher’s handbook, ‘no place to go, nothing to do.’  And puttering around the house, taking naps whenever, felt strange for a pair who preached the gospel of ‘when you rest, you rust,’ who had made ‘retiring retirement’ their later life mission (and small business).  “Wait,” said one of our older grandsons, “you mean the 2young2retire people are … retiring?”

We are still not the retiring kind, but some adjustments in how we live were necessary. The accident turned us into that rare household in our condo community with a single car, a leased Nissan Leaf plugin with a range of 80 miles under ideal conditions — 45 mph, no AC.  Most people don’t roam much further in a day and neither did we.  But that range wasn’t going to work for the long road trip we had been planning this summer.  It wouldn’t even get us to Green Cay, a favorite birding wetland, or to Miami, even if we took back roads and stuck to the 45 mph limit. Now was the time to try TriRail for a lunch date in Delray Beach: 25 minutes from station to station, a five minute free trolley ride to Atlantic Avenue.  Why more people don’t use this affordable, clean, reliable North-South transportation in lieu of the multi-lane nightmare that has become I-95, is a mystery.  Why more people who have the time, or can make the time, don’t take a page from William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways and really see America, is another puzzlement.  I could be wrong about this, of course. But my small sample of perennially jammed multilaners and sparsely-traveled rural routes suggest otherwise.

Recently, on a trip to the Northeast for a graduation, milestone birthdays, and a wedding, we decided to stay off the interstates see what the back roads were really like in five different states: Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. For this, we acquired an old-fashioned paper map and although, alas, the roads are no longer blue highways, they meander and wind pleasurably, and you’ll find plenty of opportunities to brake for u-pick strawberries, lemonade stands, and out-of-the-way diners. Although Least Heat Moon and Charles Kuralt are no longer practicing the art of the slow road, there remain lots of small towns where time seems to stand still, and it seems to me the locals are good with that.

Around lunch time one day, we found ourselves on Route 13 just over the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border.  At Milford, where we would pick up 101, we passed a small free-standing building with a verandah and a packed parking lot.  A U-turn brought us back to Papa Joe’s Humble Kitchen, where at barely noon, there was a line almost out the door, luckily most of it for take-out.  The people behind the counter were friendly and clearly, this is a neighborhood destination for working folks including uniformed first responders. The menu includes fried pickles, a burger recipe that includes ground salami, and perhaps in deference to their visitors from Canada, poutine: French fries topped with curds and gravy.  It was Friday, Fish Fry Day, featuring the best fried haddock sandwich we’ve tasted to date.  I didn’t notice whether there were 2 or more calendars on the wall — Least Heat Moon’s marker for excellent roadside food — but this is exactly the kind of experience that restores one’s faith in the goodness of ordinary people carrying on, and we could certainly use that about now.  If you’re ever in the area, stop by and see for yourself or go find a humble kitchen of your own to brag about.

Sprawl is getting worse in my adopted state, despite the obvious risks from rising seas to property and personal safety, and with that comes more congested highways, more frantic, multi-tasking, speeding drivers, more accidents.  Our own brush with disaster six months ago made us hunger for a different, more human rhythm to our days.  So far, so good.

Recommend: Rand McNally Easy to Read New England

Fans of the original book, check out Blue Highways Revisited

Nobody said it was going to be a walk in the park, although it did sort of start out that way. Okeeheelee Park in West Palm Beach, that is, site of monthly Transition Palm Beaches meetings. Okeeheelee was chosen for Transition meetings by its founders, two home schooling mothers, because it was a centrally located public space, had a nice sheltered Tiki hut and picnic tables, and plenty of playground space for their children. It all worked beautifully unless the weather didn’t cooperate. As luck would have it, my first meeting with the group had to be relocated to a nearby library due to rain and high winds. Maybe it was an omen.

I met the late Dean Sherwin, my friend and colleague in the Transition movement, at one of those outdoor meetings. It was immediately evident that we were both transplants to both South Florida and the USA. Like me, Dean had lived in Asia for periods of time. In fact, he was known to wear a sarong around town occasionally.

Dean and his wife, Susan, had been members of Transition Town Media (PA) before moving to Lake Worth, and the group was excited to have someone with direct experience of Transition join our little band, especially this gentle, kind, well-spoken pair of Quakers.

Our group was (and still is) registered on the main Transition site as ‘mullers,’ a word that would be more familiar to British-born Dean than most Americans, meaning to ‘contemplate’ or ‘ponder.’ It seemed pretty tame for my inner revolutionary, all fired up as I was by Rob Hopkins’ The Transition Handbook, essentially a blueprint for the movement. We believed – and I still do — that Transition was the most positive way to address climate disruption and peak oil. Having done some foot-weary protesting on behalf of climate, I was drawn to a movement that described itself as “more party than protest.”

Whether intentionally or not, our group gravitated to Open Space technology – a self organizing style of leadership that encourages creativity, learning and the taking of responsibility for one’s interests. Transition encourages groups to begin with the people who show up, what they feel passionate about, and the knowledge and experience they bring to the effort. The home schooling families were already deeply committed to lowering their carbon impact by growing and preserving much of their food, one of them on a fairly large spread of land in a rural area, and the other within city limits. Jean and her family were concerned about keeping their free-range chickens safe from predators, while Holly and hers had to defend their urban farming from their own neighbors. Homesteading of this type takes a lot of focus and effort, and granted, food security is critical in challenging times. No surprise, our meetings revolved around topics like composting, canning and foraging rather than on how to optimize energy savings in home and work spaces, let alone challenge the existing power and transportation grid juggernauts. I, for one, had not anticipated how entrenched conventional utility interests were; how solar would become a battleground in the state; how net metering would be a non-starter; indeed, how much in denial elected officials could be about the facts of a warming climate.  In retrospect, I would have encouraged us to focus on more ways to recruit people to the movement in the first months when we were all so fired up.

Dean was an architect by training, had built a LEED certified ‘green’ house in Media, where he also had his own construction estimating business, and had taught construction estimating. I sensed he had a lot to teach us, different ideas and directions we could explore in time. He brought a quiet strength and leavening sense of humor to the notion of Transition Palm Beaches. I think he quickly saw that even our name was a bit of a stretch for a movement founded on the importance and value of a strong local community. In square miles, Palm Beach County is the largest in the state of Florida. In population, it ranks third. The geography of I-95 could prove to be an insurmountable obstacle to real localization.

As it happened, geography has a lot to do with why after about a year, Dean and I were the last ones standing for Transition Palm Beaches. Holly and her family moved to North Florida. Jean and her family returned to their roots in Michigan. Linda, another ardent Transitioneer, decided the Slow movement in Vermont suited her better. So, in true ‘open space’ manner, Dean and I made the executive decision to rebrand Transition Palm Beaches – though without changing the registered name just yet — into Transition Town Lake Worth. As a resident, he knew that Lake Worth had many of the features of successful Transition towns elsewhere, including the one in Media he knew most intimately. Although my home was in another community, it felt like the right place to transplant the Transition seed. Dean and Susan offered Friends Quaker Meeting House for our monthly meetings, and so we began. Again.

Dean and I would have lunch at Too Jays and plan programming. We had some hits, including his presentation on modular solar panels, another on Tiny Houses, another on school gardens, and the wonderful presentation by the Colony 1 folks on January 5, 2015, with the highest attendance at 40 people. We did potlucks. We exchanged seeds and cuttings along with ideas on how to live more simply and joyfully, while reducing our impact on the planet. I know I enjoyed the meetings and the camaraderie. But what we didn’t gain was significant attendance over the period of the year, or, more importantly, traction as a leadership team. However supportive our spouses – and they were — two do not a movement make.

As many noted in memorializing him, Dean was a dreamer and doer, a joiner and a bon vivant. I found myself admitting to Susan at the reception, that what I knew of Dean was the tip of the proverbial iceberg – to my loss. He had lived large and in many fascinating places, and he had done worthwhile work his whole life. A lot of people in Lake Worth loved and respected him, from the men of his Mankind Project group who offered the most moving tributes, to people who worked with him on various public projects. In the best sense, Dean knew how to work the system, too. At the time of his death, he was vice chair of the Lake Worth Planning and Zoning Board, a proponent of the Little Free Library movement (and builder of his own cottage-shaped lending unit), and chief writer on The Cottages of Lake Worth Book, a celebration of living large in small spaces. I hadn’t realized this would be his final project when I ordered my copy.

If you’re a Facebook enthusiast, you can still find Transition Palm Beaches there, with close to 200 members, mostly inactive. Dean, Holly, Jean and I are still listed as admins to the page, so clearly it is in need of updating. The description makes it pretty clear what the page is about, and yet we have had a few ask to join thinking of a different kind of transition (here insert a wry emoticon). A Facebook page can devolve into a bulletin board for anything its members feel like making public to this group. I take down the most egregiously self-promoting as soon as I notice them. I’ve shared Susan’s beautiful tribute to Dean here.

A Facebook page can and often does support action but it cannot substitute for it. If I were able to ask Dean’s opinion, I suspect he would agree that it’s time to turn this particular page.

It was the best that could be achieved under the circumstances, and better than nothing.  One could quibble with the timetables, the fact that the carbon reduction targets are voluntary, i.e. depend on the honor system, and that our Congress as currently composed, will never agree to any action that impacts the economy, let alone something with teeth, i.e. a carbon tax.  My mood today on this topic puts me in mind of the great essay by E.M. Forster in Two Cheers for Democracy, from which this quote: “… two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.” So let me end my post here and invite you to take a break from the festivities, click on the live link (above), and experience one of the great minds of the 20th Century.  And for some recent commentary from two of the best of the 21st so far (see below).  I’m going to have myself a merry little Christmas and trust you will, too.

Falling Short on Climate in Paris

Good Reasons to Cheer the Paris Climate Deal