0 Peeling garlic outside in January

This is from a year ago.
I liked it then, and I still like it now.

Garlic, CC

I peel garlic almost nightly. 
It's a ritual. I step outside, and in the dark wintry months, look up at the stars. I am usually barefoot, even in the snow.

It matters to me enough that I've done it for years, and hope to do so until the senses dull too much for it to matter anymore.

The  garlic cloves yield their dry coats under my probing thumbs. I watch the husks slide east with the wind on good days, south on the stormy ones.

Sometimes I think about the garlic, where it came from, where it will be in a few days.
Sometimes I think about time, or seasons, or matter, or some other abstraction that counters the firm life in my hands.
Mostly I think of nothing--I have a task, a good one, and I concentrate on the task at hand.

The heft of a garlic bulb comes from the union of carbon dioxide and water, the electrons in its sugars stressed enough to release considerable free energy when returned to their native states.

Of all the organisms on this planet, humans are the only ones who burn other organisms simply for this free energy.

***

It may be wood, it may be peat, it may be wood, it may be gasoline.
In all cases, we are using up what once was food to release a power no other animal knows.

Everything that burns easily in my classroom owes its combustibility to a plant that captured sunlight, either in my lifetime or eons ago.

Wool, paper, plastic, rayon, cotton--all with electrons trapped in stressed positions, ready to tumble into the welcome arms of oxygen, releasing their stress in a blaze of light and heat.

Garlic burns, too, but we will eat these cloves tonight, their warmth felt three times--once from the work of chopping, once from the reassuring heat on the tongue and throat, and finally in the heat that radiates from my skin, up to wherever through the thin skin of a dry January evening atmosphere.

I could burn the skins, too, I suppose, but I let them drift to the ground, to feed creatures I cannot even imagine, with stuff put together by the sun, which I can.

***

We are living on the sustained efforts of other organisms, efforts that have accumulated over years, over eons.

Oil, coal, peat, and wood all take time, and work. The energy released when we burn any of these is not inconsequential--we have become gods.

When I was born, there were less than half the humans on Earth as there are now. We are consuming millions of years of free energy captured by plants like a plague of locusts, with similar consequences.

When we lose our connection to our relationships with the rest of the sphere of living things, when we consume others for anything other than food and shelter, when we fall out of the cycle of life, we lose our religion

Wandering out in the mid-January darkness to peel garlic is a small way to recapture it.

Detail: Peeling garlic outside in January

0 Tapping into the world

Transplanted a couple of basil plants yesterday, a breath of optimism against the bitter cold we've had here the past week. The back bays are freezing up, the clams will have to wait.

Today a gull with a broken wing struggles along the salty iced edge of the bay. It will not see dawn.

The sap will start rising up through the trees in a few weeks--I may tap a local maple to show the kids that it's true.

In our urge to push the abstract on our digital native, 21st century learning constructivist wired generation, we forgot along the way that they are no more, or less, human than those of us who preceded them.

If you do not know of the sap, you cannot truly know the syrup. If nothing else, we will take a trip outside our building and peer into a bucket stuck onto a tree. And while I hardly expect most to be excited about the specifics, most will be excited by the general.

The natural world is real, it's open, and it's theirs.

***

I have never tapped a maple tree, nor have any of my students. I may try it next month.

We will, together, find a tree.
We will, together, collect the sap.
We will, together, simmer the sap under the fume hood.
We will, together, taste the syrup that results.

We do not need a Maker Faire, we do not need a creative "streak," we do not need an algorithm nor a rubric, we do not need to differentiate, we do not need to rewrite the curriculum.

Most of all we do not need an excuse. We're just going to do it.

And no, it will not be on the test.

Detail: Tapping into the world

0 Clams, grace, and industrialism

Low tide came early today. The water temperature is down to 40 degrees--the clams are, well, clammed up now, waiting like the rest of us for this winter nonsense to pass.

Clams eat, they grow. I like to eat them, but I also like the idea of them. I like the way they fit in my palm, I like being on the flats where they live. I like the way my rake resonates against one. I reach into the chill and scoop it up.

Never heard one say "Drat!"

***

Clamming by hand has a cost. I stir up the bottom with my rake, enough that fish will snoop in the area I just disturbed.

I occasionally impale critters not meant for the dinner table--I managed to spear two young horseshoe crabs on a bad afternoon clamming (though a worse day for them).

But I at least knew for a moment the creatures I wounded. Knowing didn't make the agony of the broken horseshoe crabs any less painful, though they at least got a prayer as they sank to their deaths.

We got ourselves tossed out of the Garden a few thousand years ago--clamming is about as close to the Garden as I'm going to get.

I do nothing to deserve the clams, they just are.
I barely need to work to get them, they're abundant at my feet.

I'm just close enough to wilderness to wonder what we lost when we decided to stay home and plant wheat 10,000 years ago.

I work over an area a bit over 500 square yards, and figure about 5000 clams live there. I'll take about 10% of them this year, and next year 5000 clams will still be there, barring any ecological disaster.

Undeserved love, but given anyway. Can't think of a better definition of grace than that.

***

Rare clammers still make a living raking by hand. They know the critters like a child knows the sun.

Most clammers today dredge. Water is shot over the clam bed, creating a cloud of slurry, and the dislodged clams are dredged up to daylight.

The clammers will tell you they are oxygenating the water, feeding the fish, and at any rate, are not doing any permanent harm. Still, in a day when a clammer may take over 10 bushels (an old word), he's not going to know one from the other.

The environmentalists will tell you that the bottom of the seas are being scarred, and maybe they're right.

I compromise--I damage the bottom, true, but I wrestle every clam I eat with my rake, with my fingers. I never wear gloves, which may be more a testament to my stupidity than anything else, and I've spilled a bit of blood back into the bay.

But it seems more right that way, as I nestle my fingers under another snug clam from the bay to my basket.

***

I know every clam I eat. I know where it lived. They don't travel horizontally much, maybe a foot or two in a couple of years.

If ever I get sick from a clam, I can tell the DEP where it came from, withing a few dozen yards. But I won't ever get sick from a clam I know, usually in my gullet before the next low tide.

Beyond the careless destruction of habitat, the sin of the industrial clammer is not knowing the critters he sells. Since most of us are industrial eaters, not knowing where our critters came from, I can hardly blame the clammer. He's just making a living.

I can hardly blame the engineer who designs the hydraulic dredger, nor the driller at Exxon who mines oil for his boat, nor the construction woman who paved the ramp where the clammer launched his boat this morning.

No need to blame anyone or everyone, we are all complicit since we left the Garden. Grace does not dictate the market values, and we all have at least one person to feed, to shelter, to clothe.

***

You're not going to find grace at Whole Foods--you'll find fancy foods at high prices, and a few of the slaughtered beings there may have lived a slightly fancier life than their brethren at Perdue. But you still do not know them.

You pay for the privilege of a fancier form of industry, but you had to earn your dollars somehow. For most of us, earning cash requires participating in an industry.

To know grace you need to see the life drain from the creature you are eating.

Make a resolution to eat something you slaughtered, or at least grew. Religion has fallen out of favor, and our industrial cocoons shield us from grace.

Grace is never easy, nor cheap.
But it is possible.

Yes, the annual beginning of the year clams and grace post.
All photos by us, CC and all that.

Detail: Clams, grace, and industrialism