"Coach me"

A friend and I sat at the counter of the Tilth kitchen yesterday afternoon. The wet and blustery Elementals had gone somewhere, a nice patch of blue sky greeted us as Pete hustled around on a stepladder reattaching the roofing paper on the lean-to.

Prescott and I were meeting so I could introduce her to Aurora Levins Morales. Until a few weeks ago I did not know of this longtime change agent, activist and author of Medicine Stories. All that changed when Angie Hart, Tilth's Farmers' Market Manager and 2016 Apprentice sent me an email asking "Do you know this woman? She writes medicine stories and has MCS."

So here we are, two Golden Pigs (both of us were born in the Chinese Year of the Golden Pig 1947) considering an opportunity of a lifetime: Aurora Levins Morales will be in Seattle doing a co-facilitation event at the end of December. I've been gleaning and scheming Morales' website to learn about her work, and the Vehicle for Change she and her community have built.

Before and after that Seattle event Aurora and her Casita need a place to be. I began emailing Aurora about the South Whidbey Tilth being a potential place. Prescott and I were meeting to discuss that potential to host Aurora and the vehicle. Yesterday's in-kitchen meeting was awesome, inspiring and tomorrow, Thursday, October 20th Prescott and Pete will propose that an invitation be extended to Aurora to come visit. That visit will be a very real move in the direction of change for the South Whidbey Tilth community. Expanding definitions, moving on plans that have been stalled.

The issues of disability, accessibility, fragrance free zones, and the issues of education came up as we were winding down.  Prescott said, "Coach me, Moki. Pete and I will be out doing things and he'll say 'Oh, I can't do that. Or, Moki will not be able to come if we ...'

So this post and the revitalization of this site Fragrance Free in '23 is my response to Prescott's desire to be coached. The site is freshly tweaked with a new color and Pages soon to be updated. In particular the "Accessibility Opened Up" Page will include take-aways, content to be copied, reprinted and shared.

The Fragrance Free in '23 Challenge is alive, change is slow to medium, but sometimes a fire gets lit at unexpected moments and then WOOP! Thanks, Prescott this is for you and all our our wayfarers making the way by walking it!

Planning for the Grand Opening of The Safety Pin Cafe

"With Saturn in Scorpio, many find that resources are limited. Cash is a resource, but it's not the only resource. Even if you're set financially, you're probably feeling pinched and pressured in some area. You find yourself cut off from something important, or given reduced access.

Saturn in Scorpio is all about making a good investment of time and energy.  It's also about closing doors to people and things that waste your energy and drain you."

-from Elsa P.'s (my favorite astrologer) Free Newsletter

MAKE A GOOD INVESTMENT OF TIME AND ENERGY ...

COMING SOON, at the South Whidbey Tilth Farmer's Market
2812Thompson Road, off Hwy. 525

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2013

11AM - 2PM

The Safety Pin Cafe

The medicine story that began during the winter of 2012 has taken on the flesh of fun and common magic. Storyteller and makua o'o (elder in training) Mokihana Calizar brings the characters, energy of myth and magic from her mythic memoir The Safety Pin Cafe. Why the South Whidbey Tilth?
When there were few places of safety for her ... the South Whidbey Tilth was her safety pin.

a place that grows

soil

food

and

community

the perfect place to pitch the red awning and a tent for a GRAND OPENING! 

All are invited to enjoy

STORYTELLING,

MUSIC, 

TAROT,
ART, 

SIPS OF WARMTH 

& NIBBLES OF WARM CINNAMON TOAST

Learn about the Hawaiian Culture and the Language of story.
Laugh at the silliness of time and illusions of aging.

Fold paper cups and leave filled up with common magic.

Haven't read The Safety Pin Cafe yet?

Link here to read it.

While you're at it

LISTEN to the podcast about The Safety Pin Cafe
with Mokihana and WhidbeyAIR All Internet Public Radio's
Annie Horton Zeller.


Dress for the shifting season. Bring a sweater (or rain coat) to nestle against the weather.
For more information email:
 mokihanacalizarATgmailDOTcom

Words are slippery ... read more about labels Part 2

"My feeling is that labels are for canned food... I am what I am - and I know what I am. "

Michael Stipe.

( I found this quote, and then learned who Michael Stipe is.  I have lost a generation of music to living life, but am thankful to be open to learning any time, any day, in many ways.)


I remember years ago when first I stepped at the edge of safety that was the beginning of the end of my career as a corporate writer.  Thirteen years in the corporate world provided a pay check and a ladder that I did willingly bank, and climb.  I was a hippy graduate, a wife, a mother trained to teach and able to translate corporate-ese into working folk languge.  In a suit I did my work and took my training into the world of retail just before the shift from 'small' to 'mega'.  My pay checks, perks and writing skills gave me an inside track to the way corporations work.  I was privy to the slippery nature of words, advertising and contracts.  I am not proud of the role I played as intermediary ... the middle manager with the gift of gab and art for writing 'common-ese'.  What I do value though was my eventual inner clockworks that told me to step away.

Ha, what does that bit of history have to do with the title of this post "Words are slippery ... read more about labels"?  Yes, to the point.  An update to my progress with finding an alternative dish soap leads me to this:

1. I have found a local source for Dr. Bronner's soap in our town, and will venture into the store to buy one of the trial size bottles of the Sensitive (and unscented) Castile Baby Soaps.  If I'm good with that, I'll dilute the soap and try it as a dish soap.
2. In the meantime, my husband did dishes this morning using baking soda diluted in hot water, rinsed the dishes with very hot water and pronounced the dishes "pretty squeeky."  
3. On the 'what about the words on the bottle issue"

Read Labels Part 1 here:  http://fragrancefreein23.blogspot.com/2012/02/keep-reading-those-labels.html

A friend in town wrote to the Planet Inc. people and got a reply in answer to her query about the change in the labeling.  I haven't asked her if I can use her email to fill in this blog post, yet.  But in essence the company's reply was:  Planet Ultra Dishwashing Liquid  is just as it's always been; the label now uses an expanded version of the ingredients.  (the italics are mine).

I say, "Yikes and watch your step.  It's slippery there."  I have two bottles of Planet Ultra Dishwashing Liquid and though these bespectacled eyes are still those same blurry old eyes, I look more closely and report this is what I see:

1. BOTTLE #1 with written list of OUR INGREDIENTS reads:  Coconut Oil Based Cleaners - Salt - Sodium Bicarbonate.  At the very bottom of the label found on the back of the cleaner is the (c) copyright date, 2004 Planet Inc.
2. BOTTLE #2 with written list of OUR INGREDIENTS reads:  -Water (carrier) - Sodium Laureth Sulfate, Lauramine Oxide (plant-based cleaning agents) - Sodium Chloride (mineral viscosity adjuster) - Sodium Bicrdonate (mineral alkalinity adjuster).  At the very bottom of the label found on the back of the cleaner is the (c) copyright date, 2011 Planet Inc.

Let the slippery slope of words and the wish to be safe with your dish soap in old(er) age serve you in whatever way it might.  To my way of living and being, I am who I am, and know what I am.  Beware, the labels you read can change.  Is it worth a battle over a trifle difference such as this?  Choose your battle they say.  Or, at the very least, know words for what they can be.

And you?

KEEP READING those labels

Sorting life after sixty the answers continue to surprise me.  It's been a long while since posting here.  Life is full of surprises, keeping me busy and entertained.  More and more I love the moments that stretch into a calm and unsurprising mode.  Life in small spaces, a minuscule kitchen and a gigantic thousand tree living room gives new definition to 'routine.'  We live under-the-wire, but not off the grid so electricity is our friend, and handwork (washing clothes, dishes, our selves) is a small, and conscious process.  I still wash everything in the kitchen sink using baking soda and hot filtered water.  Everything except for the dishes.  Until this morning, we have used one "consumer product" to do the dishes.  Planet Ultra Dish Soap had been our consumer product of choice, because as I wrote back in May, 2011 the choice was based on the simplicity and non-toxic nature of the ingredients. 

-unscented

-coconut oil based cleaner, salt,

sodium bicarbonate(baking soda)

That's what I wrote, and those were the ingredients of Planet Ultra Dish Soap then.  Link here to read my blog post from May, 2011.  http://www.fragrancefreein23.blogspot.com/2011/05/first-one.html
This morning, I was in the Quonset Hut standing at the sink.  The back of the dish soap container faced me.  Admitting to old, and blurry vision especially in the morning, I thought my eyes were doing their blurry trick thing.  My first clue:  more than enough letters.  In bold white letters against the green stripe of the soap's advertising was this:

OUR INGREDIENTS

Water (carrier) - Sodium Laureth Sulfate, Lauramine Oxide (plant-based cleaning agents) - Sodium Chloride (mineral viscosity adjuster) - Sodium Bicarbonate (mineral alkalinity adjuster)

Our one 'consumer cleaning product' of choice has been altered.  We had assumed the comfortable bliss of believing what was good, was still good.  But that ain't necessarily so.  Except for water and Sodium Bicarbonate, our former safe dish soap is now filled with chemicals we'd rather not consume.  To read more about what chemical like Sodium Laureth Sulfate are, I've linked to a site for a product that might fit the bill for me, and my husband.  Dr. Bonner's products have been around a long while, and are among the most benign soaps.  We were having trouble with the scent of even their most unscented product a year or more past, and today, I am out to explore the possibility that their unscented variety might be a present-day tolerable soap. 

Here's a link to FAQ on Dr. Bonner's products for your information and edification, and a snip from that website's page:

Do your soaps contain any foaming agents/detergents like Sodium Lauryl Sulfate?

Absolutely not. Our soaps are 100% true pure-castile soaps. The high foaming lather of our soaps is from their high coconut oil content, which makes a more luxurious and rich lather than any detergent can ever create. "Pure-Castile" is your guarantee that what you are using is a real ecological and simple soap, not a complex blend of detergents with a higher ecological impact due to the waste stream during manufacture and slower biodegradability. Unfortunately, many synthetic detergent blends are deceptively labeled as "Liquid Soap" even when they contain absolutely no soap whatsoever

http://www.drbronner.com/faqs_main.html#faq4

 It's one of those 'Ole Moon phases today, a time when review and reconsideration is better than forging new ground.  An opportunity.  I'll be searching for a new soap to wash the dishes, or washing them with baking soda diluted in hot water until a 'product' fits the bill.  I'll also be forwarding this post to the folks at the Tilthe, so their decision to keep using the once-good-news-soap can be made with new information to weigh.

Life continues to surprise me.



Gift-giving

I was in town early this morning.  The shops were just opening, and I had met a friend for a brief but momentous few minutes.  She was on the island to deliver something I need but can't find on the island; she was here to find something she can't find where she lives now.  The details of the gift-giving I'll reserve and share instead the process of gift-giving that adds to life in the process of being 'freed-up.'  The island is at its autumn premium today cool and clear skies and a moon still full bright in the window at 6 AM.  Harvests of beautiful food ... yellow pears with cheeks of pinkish rouge, green apples that melt into a froth when topped over a bed of chopped red cabbage, green beans still snappy and delicious when steamed and the promise of acorn squash baked with butter and a sprinkle of parmesan cheese.  Earth's gifts to the gardener and farmer who has invested time, handwork and the generous conversations that only a cultivator with heart knows how to give.

We have a home where planting, poultry-raising, laughter and the slow yet steady process of healing happens.  The small gardens here in the woods have gifted me with the affirmation:  you can do this!  In the days and nights that pass, the moon, Hina, teaches me that there are different ways to count time and through those lessons my thinking and my beliefs change.  A birthday approaches, and my personal inventory and harvest of one more Earth year lived account for the good and better feelings lighting up my life.  Trials called upon my internal resources and drew from me the strength needed to care well for myself and those I love.  Those are gifts that sometimes don't arrive unless there are no other options.  From awful, something better comes and it amazes.  Celebrate the amazing, large and small!

I prepare to give myself a gift that will require a six month to one year commitment.  It is a gift of believing I can re-train my brain, and it is a gift that I believe will lead to feeling better and better.  For these months, my blogs may be inactive.  I'm not sure what I will want to write during the next months, we'll see.  The healing journey is alive and blessed with the belief that better is good, better is possible.  I've bought my birthday present a little early but it feels like it's coming right on time.

Happy harvest-time and blessings for a time of gifts that make a difference in all the best possible ways.

Dare to dream BIG

Fall is coming.  The evening temperatures are cooling, there was moisture on the winds when I woke and stretched my sleepy body that was cold from the inside out as well as the outside in.  Season change is something I make with effort, still hoping the cold will stay far enough away to keep wearing short-sleeves and sleep with the windows open at night.  My garden is still growing and I promise the beans 'There will be plenty of time (warm weather) to lengthen yourselves into thick long fruit!"  Tending and enjoying the daily joy of abundance from seeds that we have buried into dark, rich soil is in a very real way, the tending of joy and abundance that has been waiting for me after a journey of contrast.  One full year of increasing abundance is giving me the 'dare-power' to dream and allow bigger abundance.  I know the small, slow and steady effort turns pie-in-the-sky into pie-in-my-belly, and yet there is that voice that says 'And you are encouraged to dream of more.'

So after a few hours of sitting with myself after a morning of satisfying work and good writing I felt a longing.  Not quite 'bored' I sought to distract myself.  It worked.  Here  I am back to the woods and at the keys, searching for a way to express the daring it takes to dream BIG again, dream a new, and deliberately.  What would I have in this dream that moves beyond illness as a focus, and includes the goodness of a reassembled life, with more and better as the destination.  Let's try this:

when winter parks, i cannot have enough warm, dry, socks!

this winter, a just-right-for-us washing machine will be a dream long come true!!

this shower head of hot running water will be happening for us this winter, in our own bath house in the woods!

a face to face writers group gathering(something like this, with folk of all ages)
in a setting perfect for me is part of my dream coming true!

as I heal and grow better and better,
Waimanalo Beach is where Pete and I will be swimming and playing again in my dream coming true!

Big, better, better.  As I dream, believing it is on the way, I allow space for lots of socks, a hot shower, a just right for us washer, and swims in Waimanalo Beach.  OOOOOOh, I feel the warmth of those socks, gathering face-to-face with fragrance-free folk who love to write, that shower and the vibration of the gently swishing wash of clothes as we prepare to enjoy swimming and playing in Waimanalo Beach.

Are you making space for winter and beyond dreams coming true?  

Garden Party, guardians and gleanings

My Ma loved parties.  Some of my earliest memories of being with her at luau (Hawaiian parties with all the traditional food ... kalua pig, lomi lomi salmon, quid luau ...) always included Ma picking up any extra portions of coconut cake, kalua pig wrapped in napkins and tucked into her purse.  Always a generous sized purse.  I miss Ma, and yesterday it was her memory and her spirit that filled me with verve.  It was garden party day the Field-to-Table Harvest Feast at South Wihidbey Tilth.  I was so looking forward to it.  What's to worry?  Well, it's an old, old habit -- worry, and with the slow yet steady progress of healing from chemical injury, the worry warts grow unless intervention takes place.  The divine intervention of Ma's party lovin' spirit was the intervention I needed.  I'd been cautioned about the wood smoke blowing at the Feast preparations yesterday.  Prescott had called and said, "The smoke's pretty brisk and it's blowing right into the restrooms."  Pete and I clean those restrooms with our Freed-up fragrance-free routine. The obvious choice was to not come early to do the cleaning and our friend offered this, "Here's what you do.  Have Pete drive all the way back to where the forest begins.  Hold your nose to get past the smoke.  Park there!"  Okay, that sounded like a solution.  I could still make that  party.  Ma showed up before we left, her beaming party-loving face calming and reassuring. 

We arrived after most of the set-up and preparations were done, found space just where Prescott had suggested.  The smoke from the fire pit was indeed rising and blowing.  But, the grounds of South Whidbey Tilth are large enough for me to avoid the bulk of the smoke.  The tall bamboo poles with long billowing flags served as wind-and-smoke indicators making my avoidance plan easier.  One picnic table at the top of the gardens was empty and perfect for us.  I laid out our basket with plates and dinnerware, and sat myself down to watch.

The talented fairy spirit Talia Marcus was the event's entertainment.  She wandered the party with her bow and violin, a minstral playing sounds for the tiny tot who will dance and play music of her own before long; music to celebrate the crew of folk tending the lamb turning on the spit for our dinner; music for dinner; music for enjoyment.  My Ma, and Pete and I relaxed and enjoyed the festivities.  People we see every Sunday for the Farmers' Market were there and many others who are unfamiliar to me but part of the Tilth were there.  Honoring the long-time farmers was part of the purpose for this annual thank you to the community.  Speeches (short and well-directed) identified and commended each of these food providers.  Crowns of honor were bestowed:  a garland of tomato vines, another of garlic, a third made from garden gloves, a fourth a ring of wine bottle corks and the fifth, oh forgive me Molly Petersons, my memory fades.  I remember the speech on your behalf ... a thank-you for being an example of great work done as "life after social work."  Ah ... now it comes--your crown was made from seed packets.  A lively and successful raffle engaged us all after our bellies were well-filled with harvest and drink.  Winners we were, as Pete's name was called for two of the prizes making it doubly fun.

We may all be in the process of healing from any number of human ailment and many of the ailments could have been prevented, if .... If only we were perfect, omnipocent (all-seeing).  But, we are not.  I continue to be less reactive to chemicals and triggers and love having time and place to enjoy a garden party.  We had to wash and shampoo the remnants of wood smoke from ourselves after the celebration.  Fortunately I have recovered enough well-being to manage that.  The lamb, the salmon, the tables filled with food and desserts were truly a harvest feast.  To be part of it all, that was a harvest.