Kitty Grand-mama

My friend Mike and I are crazy about anthropomorphising animals. We assign them personalities from genres of plays or give them a role in a dysfunctional animal family. We’ve elected our friend’s cat to the position of Mayor. Mayor Cat, with monocle and top hat. He used to be the mayor of Lanesboro, but since his owners have since  moved to Minneapolis, he now oversees his new constituents in the window of  his Northeast neighborhood.

A few weeks ago we met Kitty Grand-mama.  She is the oldest, tiniest, frailest, grumpiest little feline. She reminds us of those crotchety old women who can barely see over the wheel of their huge Cadillacs, driving 20 miles per hour on the freeway. Old women who are sort of mean in an adorable way. They tell they’re grown grand kids that they are looking fat and then they ply them with bacon slathered green bean casserole.

Kitty Grand-mama wanted us to know whose house we were actually house-sitting. HERS. And we better pay attention to her AND leave her alone. If you pet her, you’d think you were breaking her brittle little bones by the way she keened, but then she would yowl all the more if you let up.

Let me introduce Kitty Grand-mama:

See the part when I retract my hand because I’m not sure if she’s going to bite?

Small betterments

I will tell you about two petty little feats I accomplished today that made me feel self-bettered.

-Pulled down the squeaky blue handle of the post office box. Deposited a freshly sealed envelope containing the flexible thickness of three inked sheets. Smiled with preemptive glee a the thought of of receiving reciprocal correspondence.

-Made a list on my bookmark of the unfamiliar words I found while reading a John Updike novel.  I eagerly  looked up their definitions in the disintegrating tome that is the Websters dictionary. (e.g. UXORIOUS: having or showing an excessive or submission fondness for one’s wife).

My crafty Valentine

A couple weeks ago I was reminiscing on how we used to celebrate Valentines day in Elementary school. Every kid would bring  little perforated paper cards scripted with hokey puns like ‘ Bee Mine’ (with a bumble bee holding a heart) or a de rigueur cartoon character vowing their catchphrase as a sentiment (I CareBear care for you!).  I was usually interested in making my own Valentine’s Day cards, never anything too elaborate, just some red construction pasted onto heart shaped doilies and inked with an original “Roses are Red, Violets are Blue” poem.

In seventh grade, when everyone was just a little bit too old to exchange cards and just when candy grams were beginning to be sent in earnest to the cutest and most popular kids in school, I decided to make a dozen unique, labor-intensive, and fragile Valentines for my good friends and better acquaintances.

I blew eggs.

The night before Valentines day, I sat at the kitchen table, cheeks puffed out and lips planted on cold, white, raw, eggs. As you know, the only method to get the yolk and gunk out of an egg without cracking it is to poke holes on the top and bottom and then blow. Blow hard but not too intensely or it will bust and you’ll end up with egg on your face (which happened more than once). Three hours later, with a dozen empty eggs and a very light head, I proceeded to lacquer each egg with two or three coats of red, pink, or purple nail polish. I rubber cemented bits of magazine onto each egg, spelling a name of a friend and embellishing it with hearts and X’s and O’s. I finished the project late that night I carefully placed each egg into the carton so I could transport them to safely school.

The next day, I carefully placed an egg in each of my friend’s hands and proudly wished them a happy Valentines day. I think most of them were puzzled. An egg? Isn’t that for Easter? How many candy grams do you think Janie will get this year?

By the end of the school day, almost all of the eggs had been accidentally crushed or broken in their messy desks or lumpy Jansport backpacks.  I was crestfallen.

That was the last time I made Valentines. Oh, there might have been a poem here and there, a crayon colored heart or two, but nothing as risky as hand-blown, nail polished, Valentines day eggs.

This year, I had a brilliant idea! I would make Valentines day cards for the company out of paint swatches from a home improvement store! So colorful! So easy! So thrifty! (It’s not stealing if they give them out for free, even if you’re not going to use them for their intended purpose). I swiped a handful of appropriate colored swatches, bought a heart shaped hole punch from a craft store, and found a desirable quote. Ta-da! Instant Valentine. I handed them out today and they were a hit. I have every confidence that they will be cherished.

The quote says:

In our life there is a single color, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the COLOR of LOVE.

-Marc Chagall

Get it? Color of Love? Because of the paint swatches and its the international day of love? Pretty clever huh?

Happy crafty Valentines Day to you.

Recession FYI

The current financial crisis is a result of three interrelated events: 1) the bursting of a housing bubble; 2) the decreased solvency of the financial and credit system; and 3) recessionary effects causing a decline in Gross Domestic Product, jobs, and corporate profits, and an increase in personal and small-business bankruptcies.

The problems we are experiencing today are partially a result of an extraordinary run-up in debt at every level of society – public sector, consumer, and corporate. The greatest debt expansions have occurred with consumer and corporate debt, although the recent hum of the federal printing press will soon give these other sectors a run for their money. Consumer debt alone, which 25 years ago represented about 45% of GDP, is now about 100% of GDP. And this is not just a matter of mortgage loans or the subprime lending industry but of a massive extension of credit cards, auto loans, student loans and other consumer debt.

The siren call of debt has been visible in every retail strip and in every mailbox. Could you walk down a commercial avenue in a lower-income or even some middle-income communities during the past two decades without being deluged with pay day loan operations, home mortgage finance companies, check cashing agencies, pawnshops, car title loan outlets, and tax preparer operations that offer revenue anticipation loans? Could you open up your mailbox without being deluged with teaser-rate credit card offers? I am certain that you, like me, were part of carefully selected elite group that was offered a special deal for a few months which eventually calculated out to 20% or more in interest payments. We were all special; to breathe meant you were special.

-Jeremy Nowak, President of The Reinvestment Fund

Harbringers

Friends of a feather.

I feared they might be talking about me, why else would they go so mum as I approach? Fowl conversations no doubt.

But my friend had this to say about such fears:
Oh, and I have spent much time trying to communicate with the Lanesboro birds (someday I will speak to you in ‘birdlish’) and they are not gossiping. They take pity on the pathetic earth bound bodies below and try to encourage us to flap and fly.
You just tell the birds that you are my friend and maybe they will accept you as a “wingless wonder” (if I heard correctly, I believe on of them referred to you as that in the video).

I can picture you, when nobody is watching, just past the bridge being lifted up by the birds and doing a little dance.

Whisperers

Voluntary Simplicity

The Garden of Simplicity by Duane Elgin

1. Choiceful Simplicity: Simplicity means choosing our path through life consciously, deliberately, and of our own accord. As a path that emphasizes freedom, a choiceful simplicity also means staying focused, diving deep, and not being distracted by consumer culture. It means consciously organizing our lives so that we give our “true gifts” to the world — which is to give the essence of ourselves. As Emerson said, “The only true gift is a portion of yourself.”

2. Commercial Simplicity: Simplicity means there is a rapidly growing market for healthy and sustainable products and services of all kinds — from home-building materials and energy systems to foods. When the need for a sustainable infrastructure in developing nations is combined with the need to retrofit and redesign the homes, cities, workplaces, and transportation systems of “developed” nations, then it is clear that an enormous expansion of highly purposeful economic activity will unfold with a shift toward sustainability.

3. Compassionate Simplicity: Simplicity means to feel such a sense of kinship with others that we “choose to live simply so that others may simply live.” A compassionate simplicity means feeling a bond with the community of life and drawn toward a path of reconciliation — with other species and future generations as well as, for example, between those with great differences of wealth and opportunity. A compassionate simplicity is a path of cooperation and fairness that seeks a future of mutually assured development for all.

4. Ecological Simplicity: Simplicity means to choose ways of living that touch the Earth more lightly and that reduce our ecological footprint. An ecological simplicity appreciates our deep interconnection with the web of life and is mobilized by threats to its well-being (such as climate change, species-extinction, and resource depletion). It also fosters “natural capitalism” or economic practices that value the importance of natural eco-systems and healthy people for a productive economy, from local to global.

5. Elegant Simplicity: Simplicity means that the way we live our lives represents a work of unfolding artistry. As Gandhi said, “My life is my message.” In this spirit, an elegant simplicity is an understated, organic aesthetic that contrasts with the excess of consumerist lifestyles. Drawing from influences ranging from Zen to the Quakers, it celebrates natural materials and clean, functional expressions, such as are found in many of the hand-made arts and crafts from this community.

6. Frugal Simplicity: Simplicity means that, by cutting back on spending that is not truly serving our lives, and by practicing skillful management of our personal finances, we can achieve greater financial independence. Frugality and careful financial management bring increased financial freedom and the opportunity to more consciously choose our path through life. Living with less also decreases the impact of our consumption upon the Earth and frees resources for others.

7. Natural Simplicity: Simplicity means to remember our deep roots in the natural world. It means to experience our connection with the ecology of life in which we are immersed and to balance our experience of the human-created environments with time in nature. It also means to celebrate the experience of living through the miracle of the Earth’s seasons. A natural simplicity feels a deep reverence for the community of life on Earth and accepts that the non-human realms of plants and animals have their dignity and rights as well the human.

8. Political Simplicity: Simplicity means organizing our collective lives in ways that enable us to live more lightly and sustainably on the Earth which, in turn, involves changes in nearly every area of public life — from transportation and education to the design of our homes, cities, and workplaces. The politics of simplicity is also a media politics as the mass media are the primary vehicle for reinforcing — or transforming — the mass consciousness of consumerism. Political simplicity is a politics of conversations and community that builds from local, face-to-face connections to networks of relationships emerging around the world through the enabling power of television and the Internet.

9. Soulful Simplicity: Simplicity means to approach life as a meditation and to cultivate our experience of intimate connection with all that exists. A spiritual presence infuses the world and, by living simply, we can more directly awaken to the living universe that surrounds and sustains us, moment by moment. Soulful simplicity is more concerned with consciously tasting life in its unadorned richness than with a particular standard or manner of material living. In cultivating a soulful connection with life, we tend to look beyond surface appearances and bring our interior aliveness into relationships of all kinds.

10. Uncluttered Simplicity: Simplicity means taking charge of a life that is too busy, too stressed, and too fragmented. An uncluttered simplicity means cutting back on trivial distractions, both material and non-material, and focusing on the essentials — whatever those may be for each of our unique lives. As Thoreau said, “Our life is frittered away by detail… Simplify, simplify.” Or, as Plato wrote, “In order to seek one’s own direction, one must simplify the mechanics of ordinary, everyday life.”