Pondering Kepler-22

I was just reading an article to my cousins about the discovery of Kepler-22, the newest discovered Earth-like planet. Some 600 light years away, a planet almost two and a half times the size of Earth is orbiting a star much like our sun. Talking about it with them brought some interesting facts to light.

1. If we had a space craft that could travel at the speed of light, the astronauts on the mission would have to give birth to at least 20 generations of offspring in order to complete the journey to Kepler-22. This is assuming that people give birth roughly every 30 years from the start of the mission. So think about generations of people born at the speed of light, never knowing still life on the ground.

2. I believe that our lives on Earth are heavily influenced by the planets in our solar system, especially the moon. The tides, when things grow and reproduce, our menstrual cycles, are all influenced by the moon. Imagine what effect not having a moon, or having three moons, would have on us if we lived on a different planet.

3. Kepler-22 is 2.4 times the size of Earth. That means that if Kepler rotates at the same speed as Earth, our days would be nearly 60 hours long.

That made me wonder other things, like how many 60 hour days it takes Kepler to rotate its sun, and how that would effect our concept of time and our lifespan. Would it suddenly go from 80 years to 40? How long would our seasons be? Would life seem shorter if we knew we had half as many winters or would time seem to go by slower if our seasons were 2.4x, or 4x or 6x longer?

Just some interesting things to ponder.

Another chance to ride...

Today I met my father's eldest sister, Auntie Alma, and her husband, Uncle Lester, who has been training horses since he was in high school. I had the chance to ride six-year old Jasper, an Apalloosa horse, in the ring after a few months hiatus from Katherine's lessons in Stockbridge, MA. It was nice to get back in the saddle again with a new horse, and not be afraid. Tomorrow I'm breaking up Thanksgiving courses with a ride on a Tennessee Walker. Fun times!

Union

I say union because reunion implies a returning, a customary practice, or tradition. But this week during Thanksgiving for the first time I will be meeting my three brothers. I will meet nieces and a nephew that I never knew I had, and two sisters that I haven't seen since I was nine years old. I am doing all of this in company with a father that I never knew wanted to be a part of my life. This is an immensely personal post coming at a time that I have awaited for nearly my entire life. Painful voids are slowly being filled, at the very least some questions are being answered. I am not writing this to expose a painful past but to simply state that at times it was, and to remind all, that no matter the experiences we've lost or the memories that we didn't get to make with missed loved ones, there is always tomorrow and a million memories more to make. Their is always today and the dreams we still hold dear.

Today I picked my father up from the Birmingham Airport. Tomorrow we are driving with my two youngest sisters to Blakely, Georgia, where I will be surrounded by family I never knew I had but waits for me still. Tomorrow I go to embrace them with the diamond cross my father gave me hanging around my neck. Though it does not represent who I am spiritually, I wear it in solidarity and respect for my family, to remember that despite differences, family is the most important thing beneath the sky, and because I truly believe that something both outside of myself and within myself - God - is what has finally brought all of us together.

I also need to say that I did grow up with a dad, and that even though he is not my biological father, I am so thankful to have him in my life still, even years after his separation from my mother. Now my life is twice-blessed. Where there was one, there are now two. What could I be more thankful for over Thanksgiving? I am so grateful for all the love I have flowing into my life, and for the generous souls that have touched me during this past year. I have changed and grown for the better because of it, for it, and in spite of those that try to tell me otherwise. Start following your dreams today and live the life you deserve to live right now, and don't forget to say THANK YOU!

May all of you have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Love,
DOVE

One of many projects I have completed of late...

The new lace top I crocheted with my favorite crocheted lorraine lace scarf! Details and pattern information can be found under my "Off the Hook" tab.

Reflecting on Occupy

All I can say is this: that for the last year and change I have crisscrossed this country and seen the impact that our failing economy and irresponsible government has had on the everyday lives of people just like me, older and younger. College students question the value of their education and their future, while seasoned employees find themselves starting all over again. Decreasing tourism in Maui, a surplus of graduates with no jobs in the university city of Boston, unemployment in the Berkshires, are just a few things that I have not only noticed but been influenced by in much the same way as many other Americans, I can't find a job and my student loans are in unemployment deferment. I came down to Alabama to be with family while I figure out my next steps and get back home to Oakland. I learned that my grandmother's social security checks barely cover the most essential of her living expenses. She's been a laundry maid and seen the brutality of the Civil Rights Movement, her late husband was a veteran of the Korean War, but for the first time in her life she is dependent on food stamps and donations from the food bank to make ends meet. She is part of the generation that pinched and saved so that they could have more in retirement but social security is not enough anymore. What does that mean for me? Now, in Birmingham, watching and reading about the Occupy groups gaining momentum across the country, in Maui, Boston, Atlanta, Birmingham, and at my home in Oakland and Berkeley, my travels over the last year have added meaning and familiarity to the unique struggles facing each community across the country. I can't wait to get back to my hometown and show support with my friends and family there. Until then, I am the 99% in Birmingham, Alabama.

 

Alabama

Go back to go forward. Sometimes you have to go back farther than you want to, and then farther again. I've come back to a place that I was from a long time ago. I wasn't born here. I don't know it's geography the way I know the ridges of the Sierras. I don't cherish its groves the way I do the fruit-filled forests of Maui. I don't welcome its humidity the way I do the soft misty fog creeping over the Puget Sound. Because I have never seen its small gulf coast, I am always lost in the lay of its land. I am not proud of this place, but I defend it fiercely. I don't get its religion, but its white chapel churches I honor despite myself. This place holds the people I have dared to forget about and the people I cannot stop loving. The bones of my ancestors - African, Cherokee, Muscogee, French - are moving fossils held in the rock and blood of its geology. I am angry at this land, for if I was not of it, I would never think of it. If I was not of it, I could pretend to love it. I am in this place now, breathing its soul in... and oh the truths I've learned, the secrets I've inherited, the pains I've sung, and the laughs I've ached out with tears. What a painful treasure this place is. A secret, smelling of sweet gum trees and steel furnaces, whose existence is mighty, whose history is majestic, whose truth pushes me onward boldly into a life I am no longer afraid of living.

Copyright 2011

A Rowful of Memories

Piles of seeds. They were spread all over Katherine's dining room table and underneath seedlings growing beneath florescent light. They were also in the kitchen in this container and under that stack of paper, in that drawer over there. Some were in the car or out in the barn. They were everywhere, and they all needed to go into the ground. Ideally within the next week or two. My first week on the farm, Katherine explained the various ways to plant this seed and that bulb, how far apart, how often, and when to harvest. I focused on a few packets of vegetable seeds that I thought were practical, easy enough to plant, and tasty. In short, radishes, arugula, which I had grown on Maui, mesclun, collards, kale, rainbow chard, and lots and lots of green beans.

Baby green & red leaf lettuce

Pockets full, hoe in hand, I headed out onto a patch of tilled soil that was larger than my backyard growing up. Katherine showed me how to hoe the earth in short rows about three feet wide all the way down the length of the garden, making a larger row to plant the seeds. After she left I hacked away, hands blistering, until I had made what resembled a row. I went back to the top of the row, picked a packet of seeds and began reading the instructions on the back... "2 inches deep, 4 inches apart in rows 1 foot apart..." and so I began. I marveled throughout the days in that garden at the different sizes and characteristics of the seeds, some no bigger than a needle point, others the size of my thumbnail. Somehow these little seeds would grow big enough to feed us.


As I planted the green beans memories of harvesting out in my grandmother's garden played with me. Out, in the damp humidity of central Alabama, my cousins and aunts and me would choose a row and start harvesting the beans, tossing them into the outstretched skirts of our summer dresses as we went. That evening, Nanny would store some in her Ball canning jars. The rest she would pour into several large bowls and we would each pick one to carry out to the porch. In the fading light, we shelled peas late into the darkness, my cousins and I listening to my aunts gossip and Nanny tell stories. I listened, wondering about times long ago and if one day I would have a patch of land bigger than my back patio in San Francisco to plant on. I wondered, doubtful, if I would have a garden with enough rows for each of my grandchildren to run through and if they would ever sit beneath me, listening, while I shelled peas.

Planting these green beans now, hundreds of miles away from where I first stuck my hands in the soil, gave me some pride and a new sense of patience. Like Nanny, I would learn how make something grow out of a naked patch of dirt. I would sweat in the sun for days, bent over, dropping seeds into finger-made holes, water seemingly bare ground, and then wait days, even weeks to see if the baby sprouts would emerge. I would be patient and eschew my city girl need for instant gratification. Some things I held nostalgia for, but I would not be nostalgic for shelling peas. Shelling peas was not lost. Shelling peas was not forgotten.

"Shelling Peas" by Carl Larsson

Full grown green leaf lettuce & scallions 

It took ten days to plant that garden and it took two weeks for the first seedlings to emerge. That was a week into June. Today we can go into that garden and pick arugula, surrey greens, mesclun, red and green leaf lettuce, scallions and radishes to make the most fabulous salads I have ever eaten. And it has been so for the last two weeks. Solid Rock Farm now has six gardens planted by fewer than ten pairs of hands. We have everything planted from strawberries to sunflowers, broccoli to tomatoes, gladiolas and asparagus to thyme and artichokes, and we still aren't done.

An Embracing Chaos

For the last month and a half I've been living on an organic farm in Stockbridge, MA, a small town about 10 minutes from New York, 20 from Connecticut and 45 from New Hampshire. After a few chilly months working as a hostess in Cambridge, I remembered my WWOOF-USA membership, made a few quick phone calls and scurried my way to the New England countryside. Before I moved to Maui I joined WWOOF-USA, a network of organic farmers and volunteers looking for opportunities to learn about sustainable agriculture, hoping to find an opportunity on the island. It came to naught, until a couple of months ago when I was desperate to get out of the city. Katherine was equally desperate for help on her farm in Stockbridge and had just joined the WWOOF network herself. After leaving many messages at potential farms, most of which went un-returned, I talked to Katherine, the owner of Solid Rock Farm and an industrious horse-riding instructor with a whirlwind of information and energy.

I had just left work and gotten off a two and a half-hour bus ride from Boston when I first met Katherine and was met with an embracing chaos. Katherine graciously invited me into her home where everything seemed to be moving or changing hands constantly. Piles of horse, cat, chicken and dog food lived in a corner in the kitchen below beaming photographs of her children, siblings and parents. Packages of more food and grain were stuffed into old-fashioned tin garbage cans, "to keep the rats out!" Katherine said with a smile and kept going. Horses... horse trinkets, horse paintings, horse statues peaked from beneath stacks of paper, the windowsills, and the magnets of the fridge. The counters were covered in pots and pans, packages, papers and dishes. The laundry room was filled with riding pads and girths, towels, and winter clothes tossed aside as soon as the weather warmed up. She apologized for the clutter in the kitchen as we passed through, explaining that her mother came and reorganized her kitchen about once every five years. As Katherine detailed various projects on the farm to me I caught glimpses of vibrant finches eating at the bird feeder in her window. She kept chatting energetically as she led me through her dining room, which had been turned into a temporary greenhouse. She handed me a clipboard to take notes on as I scrambled to keep up with her. I had barely been in the door five minutes but I was already beginning feel overwhelmed and a looming sense that Katherine's ambitions would require colossal strength, patience and motivation to tackle.

The front of the homestead from the "L" garden

As Katherine led me around the farm I couldn't help but notice the nostalgic charm of the land and the barns, the main house, older than the United States itself. In 1762, Larry Lynch bought 55 acres of land from a Mohican whose Christian name was Solomon. Together Solomon and Larry Lynch worked the land for an unrecorded number of years. Part of the main house of Solid Rock Farm is still the original built in 1762. It's multiple fireplaces and shuttered windows evoke images of winters spent collecting firewood hidden beneath several feet of snow and candle-lit reading sessions next to dying embers. The new part of the house, built in the 1950's isn't nearly as well insulated and hasn't weathered the decades as gracefully as the original homestead. Solid Rock Farm sits on 13.5 of the original Lynch acreage, which was dissected when the Mass turnpike was built in 1952.

Katherine's daughter Chantal with the two Falabellas 

As we walked around the property Katherine introduced me to all of the animals: 12 chickens, which turned out to be roosters predominantly much to our surprise, two rescued miniature Falabella ponies named Clair and Luna, a grey cat named Max, two geckos, two cockatiels, a canary, and an aquarium of tadpoles. Later during my stay we would acquire two dogs, Remi and Kona, a morbidly obese tabby named Calvin and another rescued pony, a mustang mare named Misty. Sometimes while working out in the garden I would point to a strange bug or grub or worm I had never seen and Katherine would collect it into one of her plastic reptile containers and tell a story about it. Then she would keep it in her makeshift classroom with food and water for a day or two just so that everyone could get a good look at it and learn it before she released it back into the wild. That's what she did when I saw my first cocoon and when two little girls stumbled upon an injured Cecropia moth on freshly mowed grass. I had never seen anything so small and majestic at the same time. The moth laid eggs. Katherine let the moth go and now its baby caterpillars are leaving droppings all over the classroom table, ballooning in size every day.

Walking around the property was refreshing after being in the house, and as we went Katherine had me jot down notes of the various things that needed to be done. Eventually, Katherine brought me back inside and showed me the room that I would be staying in once I moved. The room had a couple of boxes and a chest-of-drawers that was falling apart and filled with uncased VHS movies. It also had a bathroom, piled high with boxes and clothes and clutter. The bathroom, she said, hadn't been used in 20 years, which is exactly how long she'd been living there. It hadn't been working when her family moved in, so they just used it as storage. She brought me to the room next to mine and opened the door and out leaked the stench of juvenile body odor and stale alcohol. I then knew that it was her youngest son, Lincoln's room. He was 20, absent, and had an insatiable appetite for beer. She pointed to the mess inside reproachfully but with a smile. We continued on. The weight of the clipboard dangling in hand, already with an extensive list of would-be projects I would tackle, began to feel too heavy. The prospect of living with rodents and a strange alcoholic I had never met in the midst of this chaos unnerved me. To top it off, Katherine had to leave for several hours and left me with the list to brainstorm while she was away. When she got back, I was gone.

The upside to working at Solid Rock was that it was right around the corner from my boyfriend, Julian's house. This I didn't know until I got there. But we decided after, that it would be best for me to seek an opportunity elsewhere. The next week in the city, I halfheartedly tried to find another living situation. Boston had everything you would need in a city, but to me the streets were grim and the noises and rough scents overwhelmed my senses. I hadn't found a community yet the way I had so easily in Maui. It wasn't my city. I kept thinking about the farm with its pandemonious insides and all of that land that needed to be tilled and all the people Katherine desperately needed to get her farm up and running. My talents went unused at the new restaurant I was working at but I recognized that with a little adaptation on my part, I could blaze my own path and learn something new in the process. So after my final apartment prospect fell through and my reluctant declination to play as concert mistress for a local orchestra, I nervously decided to give Solid Rock Farm my undivided attention for the summer.

A week after my introduction to Solid Rock Farm, Julian and I drove down the Pike with my mattress and box spring haphazardly tied on top for four hours. More seasoned movers honked and signaled us along the way as my mattress lifted dangerously like a sail in the wind from the roof of Julian's Jeep. We joked about the challenges waiting for me on the farm and about Katherine's mystery son. Once we got there I raced to my new room to shuffle things around to make room for my things but the room was bare. When I opened the bathroom, the clutter that had been piled high only a week before was gone. Next to the commode you could see a quaint porcelain sink and a large claw foot tub. Everything worked. Excited and confused, I ran to find Katherine.
 "You didn't have to do that," I expressed. "That was really generous."
 "Well," she smiled, almost giggling, "We really need you, and I really believe that you can't outgive God."
And despite the numerous challenges that I've faced and we've faced since my upheaval and arrival, Katherine has proven that to me over and over and over again.

Nappy-Headed Girl

On my 20th birthday I had my mom chop off all of my chemically straightened hair, leaving roughly an inch of tight 4a/4b type curls. While she was cutting she pointed out the chemical burns on the nape of my neck, the same burns that my best friend, Rachel, noticed months earlier. I had never seen them of course. But as she ran her cold fingers up my neck asking "What's that?" I remembered the feeling of the chemical burn from months ago. I was relaxing my hair in my dorm room while studying and had let the chemicals stay in too long. My whole scalp and the nape of my neck had weepy wounds and was scabbed for weeks.

Rachel was dumbfounded when I told her. She didn't understand why I couldn't just wear my hair naturally. "It's ugly, it's dry and nappy, and I don't like it," I said to her. Really, it was that I simply didn't know my hair. My hair was straightened regularly from a very young age. I remember getting that very first perm by my mom in Nanny's kitchen. The pungent fragrance wafting from my hair and filling the room with chemical vapors. Scalp tingling, body fidgeting. After that, my hair was always a problem. Before then, I never really thought about my hair. I had a full mane of thick dark kinky curls that grew freely, but no one knew what to do with it. I was a nappy-headed girl.

Because my hair was now supposed to be straight, it was also supposed to grow long and behave like the hair did on white girls' heads, but it never did. It would get to my shoulders then break off. My hair was always dry. It was never supposed to get wet except on wash days, otherwise my mom would have to straighten it with a curling iron again (heat straightening chemically-straightened hair is ridiculous and extremely redundant).  I didn't understand why my hair wouldn't grow. And I would see other black girls with relaxed hair dealing with the same problems. Dry, brittle, broken hair. I began to believe that black girls couldn't have nice hair, that it would never grow past my shoulders, which I now know is a lie. I began feeling insecure about my hair, especially since most women, even women of color in pop culture and the media either are ethnically European or wear euro centric hairstyles. As an alternative, I loved and still love wearing extensions occasionally, but the long-term side effects - scalp alopecia and premature balding - were very disconcerting.

So I decided to chop it all off. I was angry. I had been straightening and hiding my hair for so long, that I didn't even remember what my natural hair was like anymore. Since then, leading a more natural way of life has become one of my goals. It has meant, eating more organically, using safer, healthier environmentally friendly products, and leading a greener lifestyle. It has meant being a more honest and authentic individual. It has meant being more true to myself. Who knew that making such a decision could have such a large impact? It certainly has been a journey (I'm still learning about the nature of my hair four years later), and it's a journey that more and more black women are deciding to take, thankfully. There is a growing community of women out there, who are becoming more educated about our type of hair, rewiring their minds to love and accept the beautiful curly tendrils that they were born with, and raising their children to do the same.

It is Mother's Day and I would like to thank my mom for being there for me throughout the whole process of learning to love and accept my hair, and in turn learning to be more loving and accepting of my self.

This was not what I had in mind for my welcome posting but I found this awesome video on YouTube.com. I'm so glad it's there now for little afrobellas to see. I wish it had been when I was younger. Check it out.

Cute, huh?!

Welcome to Dove's Song! :-)