Fragments from Floyd

The margins of the creek are just beginning to crust over with ice. Some of the ponds between home and work are showing a thin glaze of ice in patches on the surface.

I’m thinking maybe next week will be the first week of the current Ice Images season. This one I call Ice Gnomes from a few years back, was taken during January after a couple of freeze-thaw cycles.

Wish I had more time but duty calls.

Did I get the day right this time, Doug? We have a short-hand in documentation of a patient’s state of with-it-ness: A + O x 3. I’m not always: alert and oriented to place, person and time. Today, maybe.

Speaking of short-hand: overheard at SEJ conference, someone complaining about all the TLA’s in their life. What’s that, someone asked. Three Letter Acronyms.

Yesterday I attended the ROA meeting to discuss the AEP spraying of power line ROWs near Crystal Creek. The EPA had representation there. I’ll be writing up a piece on the proceedings and outcome PDQ. BTW, I used my new digital recorder and have a 1.75 hr MP3 file with time markers from my MBP notes in VDP. Tired already of acronyms? Well you’re SOL.

On the GEEK homefront: I was about to sing the praises (at least for MAC ears) of Backboard. I’ve used BackPack for years especially for reminders. Backboard gives the user an “organizer” linked to BackPack for notes, reminders, tasks, and (if you are a paid subscriber) calendar events. I have been using Backboard for two weeks, and surprised to find myself migrating once more: to web-based Springpad.

It took me a while to understand that cloud-app’s usefulness. You know how it is when you confront a new way of organization and it’s BLANK to start with. Organized blank pages don’t seem very useful. But as I began to create folders of lists, notes, and alarms (all easily moveable within and between “springpads”) I’m realizing this about as  close as I’ve come yet to replacing ECCO PRO from my PC days. (More on Springpad at Webworker and at BlogSpring.)

Now, if somebody would just give us ONENOTE for the Mac…For now, Voodoopad serves that role somewhat, just updated to Version 4.

The day ahead, brisk and windy: BRISKY. Tin roof ruffling in the gale. Stoke the dog, walk the woodstove, chores in town, lunch with DT, a stop by Bank of Floyd (”Save at the sign of the sock”), notecards to the Country Store, a run to Slaughters with a honey-do list, and visit some new friends at their place.

A + O x 2. About all you can expect for a fella of my advanced years, don’t ya reckon?

I can’t remember for sure but I think it was Flickr where back in the spring the folks at Monticello found this picture of bloodroot (click for larger version) and asked if I’d be willing for them to use it. That just fell into place this week.

I’m pleased to have my image from our roadside (with a tiny photo-credit and bit of compensation adequate to pay for a month of DSL) to illustrate a timeline of Thomas Jefferson’s brothers and sisters birth and death. It is or will soon be accessible (on screen display?) in some fashion at Jefferson’s home place near Charlottesville.

Spring wildflowers–they bide their time under a skiff of snow this morning, waiting for a cold five months in the frozen ground. Somehow just knowing they’re out there invisible gives hope: color, warmth, and short sleeves will come again.

Image via WikipediaSaw a person be hypnotized once at an event back in college.

The hypnotist told the person he was handing them a crisp red apple, which they consumed before the audience with delight. It was an onion. We experience what we expect.

So I may have found a similar way to save on firewood this winter. I’ll make it sound warm. I’m thinking that might just save me a half cord of real heat.

If she hears the sound of the wood stove ticking and popping, maybe it’ll taste like an apple.

If she hears warm, maybe she’ll feel it.

For those of you not familiar with the fact that a stove half filled with firewood carries on a gentle percussive rattatatt of expansion and contraction, this 20 second recording of our stove might be a revelation. (With the mic right under the stove, the sound is more harsh than my ear hears it just now some eight feet away.)

For me, it is so common I don’t really hear it, though I miss it in spring when we put the stove to rest.

Speaking of things combustible, we’re thinking about replacing our small stove near the kitchen with a new version of the old-fashioned wood cook stove. That’s what these folks in the picture must be laying up wood for–you see how small they split or cut their fuel–cutting up limbs and branches means a good deal more work than cutting larger “body wood” for a heating stove like ours.

And let me disabuse you of the notion that using wood for heating or cooking is free. But for the most part, the cost is worth the comforting tick-tick-tick on a cold December morning.

The outcome of the Wednesday morning meeting in Roanoke may determine more than just the future of AEP power line right-of-way control along a tributary of Back Creek in western Roanoke County.

If nothing else comes from the gathering of city officials, AEP officials, local advocacy groups and area neighbors, attention will be focused on the choices we make when by our action or inaction we weigh efficiency against health–specifically the known and unknown costs and risk of herbicide use near creeks and streams.

The herbicides in use (how widely used by AEP across its rather vast service region) are Clearstand-Lineage together with Krenite. Both have stated risks when used near water.

Interested parties are encouraged to attend the meeting at 9:30 am at the Roanoke County Admin Bldg (Bernard Dr), in the 4th floor office of the Cave Spring Magisterial District Supervisor.

Related reading:

Roanoke Co. man questions effects of herbicide

Should AEP be spraying hazardous chemicals?

“To reach the distant shore of an uncertain future, we can’t just do what we’ve always done. As this tsunami of change comes to our here and now, we can float like flotsam or sink like a stone; but if we will set our minds to do so, we will paddle for all we’re worth and the flow of change will transform us for a future fit for living.”

This is the last paragraph of an essay I’ll post in its entirety before long. Until then, indulge me: I just got my new digital recorder yesterday and had to play with it.

You can listen (I hope) to this 4 minute piece on CHANGE by clicking the link.

… and an order of chicken flavored Corn Nuggets with Corn-sweetened ketchup and a half gallon of Corn Syrup Soda. To go.

I wrote recently that I was “encouraged that even American politicians would once again acknowledge that truly sound economies were built on the soil.”

Toward that end, and because we are at large a sick, ill-nourished society, we must end the corn cartel. Corn sweeteners, fillers and fodder are doing us in.

Consider this from yesterday’s SciAmer online:

If you thought you were eating mostly grass-fed beef when you bit into a Big Mac, think again: The bulk of a fast-food hamburger from McDonald’s, Burger King or Wendy’s is made from cows that eat primarily corn, or so says a new study of the chemical composition of more than 480 fast-food burgers from across the nation.

And it isn’t only cows that are eating corn. There is also evidence of a corn diet in chicken sandwiches, and even French fries get a good slathering of the fat that makes them so tasty from being fried in corn oil.

CORN: It’s genetically modified and patented, soaked with Monsanto herbicides to maximize yields, planted in square mile monocultures in the parched and depleted soils of the mid-west, grown in slash and burn former tropical rainforests in Brazil to make biodiesel to get inefficient American automobiles to the shopping malls. Corn© is making some few American’s (mostly not farmers) famously fat-rich and most of us simply fat-obese.

9:00 am FLASH: NYTimes site hacked this morning. From a future July 4th (2009) edition: the war is over.

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Image via WikipediaI am (at least temporarily) infused with hope. I’ll tell why more fully in an upcoming post, but some of it you can guess:

It seems possible folks at the top will once again think, listen and act on behalf of “the people”: humanity at large–next term, next decade, next century. I could be wrong, but ignorance is, well, you know.

So perhaps we will rethink biofuels might come from sources other than genetically modified ConAgra-ADM corn©. In the crucial years to come, perhaps science will regain its good name and small labs and enterprises can compete in the actual marketplace of ideas and not just the marketplace of corporate influence. I dunno.

I do know that, in a short conversation with Lyle Estill of Piedmont Biofuels, he rightly dismissed my enthusiasm for algae as a biofuel source–at least for now. “Show me a gallon produced for less than $500 and I’ll listen.” Even so, the common sense of the Sun-Food-Fuel agenda advocated by Michael Pollan and others will keep the photosynthetic efficiency and oily vacuoles of algae on the drawing board.

So I know better than to invest too much zeal toward this end even lower down the feeding chain. But folks, this is the kind of earthy discovery that a hundred years from now MIGHT turn out to be a turning point that bootstraps us out of the dustbin of history. It has recently been discovered that biodiesel components are made (have always been made) by a lowly fungus , newly named, found in-between the cells of a tropical tree.

Gliocladium roseum can even produce the gaseous components of biofuel from cellulose stock–the non-digestible part of wood and agricultural byproducts we produce by the millions of tons each year.

We’ve miles to go (on carbonaceous petroleum no less) before we sleep here, but some day, you may remember you heard it hear first: One word, Benjamin: mycodiesel. (The new plastic? Speaking of which...)

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I’m home on a Tuesday, one of two usual work days. The census was already falling–the peaks and troughs not clearly related to any one thing except perhaps after an ice storm sends wrist fractures and other winter traumas our way in January. So with things slowing down, I was looking ahead at less than full days that typically consist of my seeing eight patients at the physical therapy clinic.

But the scheduler’s email yesterday apologized: there were only FIVE patients originally on the schedule for me today–worth the 18 mile drive over; I’m paid by the hour. Three canceled; the other two were picked up by another therapist. So I stay home and make nothing–at a time when I’ve been thinking if anything, I need MORE work–another day a week at least–to offset the stupendous loss of our nestegg, now hummingbird-sized and not enough for our so-called golden years. The metal ahead looking more like lead.

People still have needs for therapy. But there’s the rising co-pay. There’s the increasing reluctance of insurance policies to approve enough treatment visits to be efficacious. And there’s the cost of transportation (per gallon rates in a temporary lull for now). So a spate of cancellations in good weather is probably a wave of the future, and I’d best be thinking about a Plan B. Something done from home would make the most sense. Exactly what, I have not the foggiest notion.

So, with rain expected later this week, I’m out to the woods with the chain saw to begin working on next year’s firewood stacks. I figure a truck load of wood for the day is a pretty good return for effort, at least as satisfying to see as an improved gait pattern or normalized range of motion or stronger muscle group or improved posture.

Will I work today? Yup. Will I be paid? Yeppers.

I stopped in the Country Store to chat with Jen the manager about notecards and another project in the works. Near her office, a group of mothers with toddlers formed a circle, dancing more or less to the rhythm of a modern-day nursery rhyme.

I was fascinated to watch how the mothers and children, children and children interacted with each other, the music and the space.

Wait a minute! I had stuck my camera in my pack with the assumption I might come across some shots too good to miss. And here was the moment.

Especially fun to watch was the little boy (what: maybe 18 months old?) who at first appeared somewhat needy as I first noted him standing in the middle of the rug while others danced around him.

But no. He was anything but shy or needy, and he was INTO the music. Amazing how from such an early age some kids GET the math and aesthetics of music. This child is one of those for whom music will be like breathing. Wait and see.

To open the Society of Environmental Journalists eighteenth annual conference in Roanoke on October 17th, co-chairs Bill Kovarick and Ken Ward acted out a fruit-toss visual lesson in local pronunciation: Apple. Atcha.

“That’s how we say it, and welcome to Roanoke in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia.” With that, several hundred journalists and guests from across the nation were welcomed to our beautiful part of the world.

The week’s sessions focused as much on possible solutions as on the problems we face. Many experts in their fields expressed the conclusion that very soon we “need home runs, not base hits” to put in place viable energy alternatives and reduced carbon emissions policies and practice on a global scale.

Speakers educated conference attendees during every meal, on bus rides to field trips, and at back-to-back sessions from Wednesday breakfast until Sunday noon. So while a full account of the time is impossible in this space, I want to share with you some memorable personalities from the conference.

Amory Lovins of Rocky Mountain Institute has offered energy efficient alternative technoogies for years; the market may finally be ready to listen. Lovins work has long been where we must soon go–to lighter cars and more energy efficient buildings. See his description of tomorrow’s Smart Garage.

In 2002, Lyle Estill, co-founder of Piedmont Biofuels, turned a little cooking oil left over from deep-frying turkey at home into a million-gallon-a-year business converting used fats and oils into fuels. See Small is Possible: Life in a Local Economy.

Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm near Staunton, Virginia, farms in much the same way his predecessors would have a hundred years ago. In a recently rediscovered farming practice, he fattens 200# pigs to a finish weight of 300# inside temporary fencing that contains them in oak forest.

The acorns give the meat a unique and desirable taste–so much so that the 800-restaurant chain, Chipotle, takes all the Polyface pork it can get.

Salatin encourages environmental writers to use their voices to increase the public’s “educational footprint” toward new understandings of the way we produce and consume products from within local “farmsheds.”

Roanoke was chosen for this year’s Virginia-tech sponsored conference in part because of its proximity to the sites of major environmental concern in our region and the nation: mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR).

Mining executives among the speakers saw the greatest good in producing as much coal as possible for the lowest possible costs–at least in dollars. Others saw coal’s costs measured in other ways, holding the opinion that post-mining mitigation (making the land like it was before) is nothing more than “lipstick on a corpse”; and that you “cannot regulate an abomination.” The long view and hope of many is towards a “post-carbon economy.”

The personal cost and human impact of current coal-extraction methods was expressed most eloquently by Wendell Berry, cultural and economic critic, prolific author and Kentucky farmer. At the final Sunday morning Author’s Breakfast, Mr. Berry read an essay he had offered months earlier on the Kentucky capitol steps.

He considers MTR the “moral equivalent of genocide” whose end is permanent loss of place and culture. In the light of the failure of lesser measures of “non-violent insistence” to bring about an end to these atrocities, Mr. Berry expressed a reluctant personal willingness to “stand in the way of destruction.” I highly recommend the youtube record of that speech.

As a life-long resident of the Southern Appalachians, I’m gratified that, as these hundreds of journalists and other visitors return home from their brief time in southwest Virginia, they will know much more than how to pronounce the name of our gentle mountains.

They have appreciated our music and our culture; and from their comments, they were impressed by the kindness of the people here and by autumn’s peak of color in the Blue Ridge.

SEJ journalists now have a richer understanding of our deep bonds of connection to place and have experienced in some small way “the infinite private suffering” of those whose mountaintops and creeks have disappeared.

And every time they turn on the lights back home, they will know in new ways why there will never be such a thing as “clean coal.”

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I know this from my photographer’s experience: any image I take is one of a kind. Each composition—in light or in words—is unique. The light will never be that color from that angle on that exact configuration of barn, tree or wildflower ever again.

And this: that we too often take for granted the extraordinary senses of vision and hearing, touch and smell that are our gifts—opportunities given us by which we could know the familiar beauties too often missed or dismissed in our hurried lives.

We have so little time in the present and there is so very much to take in and share. There are wonders all around. From our everyday lives, these familiar things may seem unremarkable to us. But in these precious instants in time, if we keep our eyes open and our hearts ready to know it, there is nothing ordinary.  ~ from the Author’s Note,  Slow Road Home.

Click image for enlargement in black and white.

Certain days feel like pages turned, and surprise! A new chapter begins–characters, settings and plot take a sudden shift–and you can’t say exactly why the day and days to come feel so new and fresh or where the story leads next.

Certainly our stage props have changed such that, in our week away, the forest disrobed to reveal an open fence of vertical trunks where before we left it was still swathed in an obscuring curtain-barrier of red-shifted leafery.

The garden needs no attention now though I’ll be out there later today winterizing the tiller and mowers. I’ll miss it, and it will be a relief, though wood gathering takes its place.

The winter’s wood is already dwindling from a couple of early fires the wife insisted on (though not today with temps expected in the 70s–far too warm for November.) Yesterday I cut into some oak with the saw, and to be sure, the smell of it has done its part to trigger the page-turning toward what lies ahead.

Plot development? Not so much that I can read it very clearly from here. Upcoming, the Forest Watch event at Hollins on Saturday. (And if anyone reads this far and comes to that event, the FIRST person to ask gets a FREE set of notecards.)

And several good things are coming together on the photography front–even so far as to anticipate a small bit of income to re-invest on something like Lightroom (I hear there’s a learning curve–great for long winter days indoors!), a polarizing filter for the 18-200 lens, that sort of thing. I’ll be telling you about some of the places where you can find my photos coming up soon.

What pages are turning with regard to future writing? Will I repurpose “book two” or pitch it “as is” to the couple of somewhat hopeful outlets I’ve been exposed to since SEJ? Will I re-up for another year of newspaper columns or is that too much time for too little return of readership, reach or revenue? And whither blogging, so changed as it is from the first pages. To blog is more and more like a shout from the front porch just to hear the echo off the barn. I realize my rhetorical questions are mostly for me to consider alone. And yet…

One never knows where the first page of a new chapter will lead. After all, we’ve never read these pages before and thankfully, can’t turn to the back and see how the story ends

Wendell Berry Image via WikipediaI expressed my hopes recently that Mr. Obama might encourage the earthcare values lived and written by Wendell Berry. Then the next day, I finished reading Michael Pollan’s NYT letter to the future “Farmer in Chief” and thought how different our world could be if we did nothing else but to reassess from the soil up our agricultural relationship with the planet.

And on Hoarded Ordinaries (thanks Lorianne!) I find Obama has understood the ramifications of the “omnivore’s dilemma” where changes to that failed system of bigger-hammer agriculture will help us nutritionally as much as politically. What energy issues could be more radical and in need of change than how we grow, ship and eat the food that sustains (or damages) us?

Below (from an interview with Time mag) is a snippet of Obama’s wholistic expression of hope for healthier foods, buildings, cities, transportation. What he grasps–in a way unfamiliar among our generation’s politicos–is the paradigm shift (read: change) that will be necessary to the very survival of our species. Whether he can make the kind of Manhattan Project for the Sun-Food Agenda (and in other sectors as well) happen in four years remains to be seen. But we can start. We can hope. We can work to be the faithful stewards Mr. Berry and Mr. Pollan encourage us to be. Yes we can.

There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy. I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen [sic] about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil.

As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs.

That’s just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.

Interesting to note that McCain faults both Obama, and indirectly Pollan, for their ignorance of how Big Ag really works. No paradigm shift in view here, just biz as usual.

For those who live in the Appalachian culture, geography and heritage and are perplexed by the sharp, invisible blue versus red divide between close-lying areas as well as for those from outside who don’t at all know what to make of the politics of America’s southern mountain outback, I’d recommend this recent piece from Moderate Voice: Canvassing for Obama in Southern Appalachia excerpt below.

Appalachia is a land of contradictions. It’s a crossroads of peoples, and it’s an isolated pocket of cultural residue. It is a place and it is a mentality. Appalachia conjures up the most beautiful mountains and valleys, and the most environmentally denuded places in the country.

Its signature music - bluegrass - perfectly encapsulates these contradictions. The standard songs come from 19th century Tin Pan Alley standards, Gospel hymns, 17th century Scots-Irish reels, 1960s folk anthems and African American blues. The instruments - the Spanish guitar, the Hawaiian (by way of a Slovak manufacturer) Dobro, the Scottish-Irish-English fiddle, the Italian mandolin, the African banjo - all reflect the varied influences on a music most Americans think of as “traditional” - even if only 50 years old.

Appalachia is a land of contradictions. And so is its politics.

One can drive through Floyd County this week and see these divides in the yard posters, one community to the next; and if truth were known, those biases hark back to deep divide of the Civil War.

Forget, hell.

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House-cleaning here, some snippets in the to-blog folder I won’t get to at any level more than to pass along the link. I don’t seem to be able to quite catch up, but there’s an end in sight, slower days ahead–sometime in January during an ice storm, I think.

10 Most Fascinating Savants in the World Fascinating indeed. Each one of these unique people tell us something about how the mind works, could work, or changes in some cases for the better when it’s “broken” in some unusual way.

Coal and Civil Disobedience: the Dominion 11 “Wise County residents have been fighting Dominion’s plans since they were first announced 18 months ago. The new Dominion coal-fired power plant, if built would release 5.37 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually.”

Tidbit from SEJ: I think it was Amory Lovins (Rocky Mountain Institute) who told us that, if all the states operated as efficiently as the ten most electrically-efficient states, the nation could reduce its electricity needs by over 60 percent. That certainly does harm to the notion that we can’t get the electricity that the (see above) Wise County plant would produce in less harmful ways. Conservation profits the commons, other options–the profits go to pockets. Which group has the more powerful lobby in Richmond and DC, you reckon?

Hints to White Nose? Or Not? A new cold-adapted fungus has been found associated with–but not necessarily causing–White Nose Syndrome that is causing precipitous decline of some bat colonies in the northeast. If determined to be the cause, it would join the ranks of other newly-virulent or widely spread fungi wiping out our animals. The the class Amphibia is also being seriously harmed world wide by a fungal disease.

The Daily Climate: SEJ08 Award-Winning Reporting on Global Warming Edition. Does your party believe we should simply let market forces deal with global warming?

Earth on course for eco ‘crunch’ The planet is headed for an ecological “credit crunch”, according to a report issued by conservation groups. (BBC) The consensus among panelists and speakers at the SEJ conference (during the World Series) was that we don’t need a “base on balls. We need a home run. In this inning.” Remember that when you vote tomorrow.

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This morning, more than ever, the hearth is the heart of home.

We were gone a week. Yesterday, we left Ann’s Subaru behind with our kids in Missouri, flew out of St. Louis, out of Chicago, out of Charlotte and into Roanoke on a clear, too-warm Saturday afternoon, comfortably surrounded by mountains–not the hills we’d left in the Show-Me State. Appalachian geology felt a Goldilocks just right.

We met the taxi at the curb, and for the first time–maybe ever–I was a passenger with no responsibilities but to observe all the way home. I remember noting on the dash that the temperature when we left the sunny airport was 71. When we pulled into the deep woods of Floyd County 45 minutes later, it was 49.

Remarkable how the world had aged since we left, its colors blanched toward but not quite brown. The whole world had lost weight, its bare bones showing in the forest. Seasons come shockingly quick when you don’t watch the changes day by day.

I had monitored our local weather from half a continent away, imagined the bite of high winds that had licked down into our valley and blown about a surprising number of things from under the shed as we discovered walking up the drive at dusk yesterday.

While we were away, temps had been in the upper 20s a few nights, but in balance I felt pretty sure the house would net a few degrees above daytime temperatures and remain safely above freezing overnight, what with the southern windows letting in a bit more sun energy than radiated back.

It was a chilly 53 in the house when we opened the door carrying a double armload of mail. We were otherwise unencumbered; our bags are stranded somewhere between Chicago and home.

Barely alive. That’s how the old place felt, neglected and inanimate for a full week and without life support.

It will take several days yet to rewarm the old-pine floors, walls and ceilings. By mid-week my oak desk will no longer be dead-cold to the touch.

The first hint of sun reveals the skyline of the east ridge. The wood stove on the hearth pulses flickers of orange flame through the glass door, living light reflected in my monitor. Life begins to knit back together, and everything–or at least enough for now–in its place and all is well.

The edifice at this address stirs slowly from a lonely, lifeless hibernation, movement from within once more. The soft incandescence of early morning economies within spills out the windows for no one to see but the deer grazing in the wet pasture, grasses just green now bent and butterscotch for the winter.

What has for days been only a house is once again a home. And if you’ll allow the cliché, there’s no place like it. (Click thumbnail for larger image.)

We stood last night on the University of Missouri campus for several hours to see and hear a man I believe will be our next president.

I believe him to be a good man, and wise in ways I’ve not known a politician to be for some decades. I will vote for him.

But I don’t expect him to be all things to all people. I do expect him to chose for a cabinet those who can do the most good for the most people. A president’s advisors probably exert a greater sum total of change in a four year reign than the president himself. Bush was not a good man for the job, his advisors in effect were even worse.

That being as it may, I wondered what Mr. Obama would do with the land ethic and agrarian economic philosophies of a man I admire more than I admire the democratic nominee. I think Wendell Berry’s vision of what can be right about our country demonstrates true wisdom.

We need wisdom in government at all levels–down to the level of households and communities. I hope we will see our future economy based on soil and rootedness to place. I love to imagine Wendell Berry as Secretary of Stewardship in an Obama administration.

For those of who don’t know Wendell Berry, this recent opinion piece (DallasNews.com) about the man’s intersection with contemporary American predicaments is well worth the read, from which the following excerpts

… to all appearances an old-time Democrat, his faithfulness to his iconoclastic vision makes him an uncomfortable presence among the mainstream left and has won him new admirers on the dissident right. He is a moralist hostile both to big government and big business. He is a Christian who can’t be understood apart from his deep religious conviction that humankind is under divine command to be good caretakers of creation – the land, its creatures and each other.

In the months and years to come, we all will have to learn the meaning of limits. Wendell Berry is no dour scold who preaches a joyless austerity. To the contrary, he tells us that what we truly seek in life is not comfort, but meaning – and that you don’t have to live a life of rigorous asceticism to find it. Rather, we only need to order our lives around the ancient idea that happiness depends on virtue – virtue lived in community. We can only be fulfilled by living within the bounds prescribed by our nature, and in fidelity not to our selfish desires but to the greater good of our families, friends and communities.

Virginia Forest Watch, a group dedicated to maintaining and restoring the natural ecology and biodiversity of woodlands across Virginia through education and citizen participation, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year.  The event will include:

• Local favorite Blue Mule will perform in its own Blue Grass style.
• Readings by nature writers Fred First and Chris Bolgiano.
• Silent auction.

No admission fee, donations welcome  Join us November 8, 6:30 pm, at Hollins University Chapel in Roanoke. More details…