b o t t o m l a n d

more mother's day musings

The true story of Mother's Day precedes Hallmark cards and flower delivery services.  It originated as a day of mothers gathering to demand peace in the face of the carnage of the Civil War, and Julia Ward Howe's original proclamation and rallying cry reads as all too pertinent to our current global situation.  Of course, a day to celebrate our mothers and our mothering selves is great, but our culture is all too quick to trade action for consumption.  As mothers it is our sons and daughters (and husbands and selves) who are turned into killers by the machine of war.  As mothers it is another woman's child being killed by our own.  As mothers we hold the power of human life in our bodies, and we hold the moral authority to declare that all of life is sacred.  If we hold our tongues, who will speak for peace?  If we are so easily silenced by the command from on high to consume as usual, who will show the moral fiber to name this madness for what it is? 

A great short essay describing the evolution of Mother's Day is here, written by a UC Davis prof, and below is a poster from my very favorite artist Nikki McClure, which can be purchased here.   Also, many awesome women's peace organizations exist today, such as Code Pink and Mothers Acting Up.  Check it out, and let's think together about what kind of values we want to instill in our children, and what kind of world we are creating for them.

Mother's Day Proclamation - 1870
by Julia Ward Howe

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

addendum...

I wanted to clarify that my ire regarding maternity care in this country is not directed at individuals struggling to make sense of their choices, but at the system that does not provide women with an opportunity for informed consent.  I hope my post would never make any individual woman feel bad about her birth experience, but that we would be able to respond as a community to this health-care crisis.  However, I do strongly reject the posture of "I'm okay, you're okay, we're all okay."  No!  Not all birth "choices" are equal.  There IS something wrong with birth in America and we need to re-evaluate our cultural practices and ask if they truly serve women and children.  I heard a woman on NPR say this morning, "there is a world of difference between responsibility and blame."  Yes!  We have both personal responsibility and communal responsibility.  We need to support one another as we struggle to make healthy birth and parenting choices, and comfort one another when our birth stories bring grief.  Love leaves no room for blame.

Note on the picture:  One of my old favorites of when Little C was about 6 months old.

the business of being born

I just watched the powerful movie, The Business of Being Born.  If you have not had the opportunity to see it yet, I highly recommend it to any adult who cares about the process of birth in this country.  (You can get it from Netflix, or you can ask your local library to order it! Nudge, nudge!)  Regular readers of this blog and those who know me personally will know that normal birth is a passion of mine!  This is such an important topic and a timely movie, as the c-section rates in America have risen 400% in some places over the last fifteen years, spiraling out of control to levels of 45% or more of births in some urban hospitals.  I cannot state this strongly enough: this is a crisis of health-care in our supposedly "developed" country.  C-sections are major abdominal surgery and pose much greater risks for the health of the mother and baby.  Yes, they are medically necessary sometimes, (in my calmer moments, I like to think that mine saved Clara's life) but there is no accounting for the rate they've reached in this country.  Actually, our maternal and infant mortality rates are among the worst in the industrialized world. In a UN study of 171 countries, the US ranked 41st on maternal mortality rates, far behind our global peers in Europe and Japan, and below developing countries such as South Korea (1).  According to an article published on CNN.com, highlighting a study by Save the Children researchers, the US has an infant death rate second only to Latvia in the industrialized world.  Incidentally, one of the key differences between America's birthing industry and the birthing practices of the rest of the world is midwife attendance.  Midwives attend upwards of 70% of births in Japan and many European countries in stark contrast to less than 8% in America. When midwives attend births, the levels of c-sections and other medical interventions decrease accordingly.

Bewilderingly, TIME magazine just published a chilling article on the popularity of elective c-sections among "choosy moms."  (I'm linking to this article, even though it is full of misinformation and flat out contradictions to well-documented medical facts.  PLEASE educate yourself about the reality of the situation before reading an article like this and believing it!)  This is a sickness in our country, that we would choose the "convenience" of an elective cesarean and subsequent tummy tuck over the potential health risks to our children and ourselves.  Vaginal birth provides a variety of documented health and safety benefits to our babies, ones that should only be overlooked for the option of cesarean only in the most extreme of circumstances.  A woman is five to seven times more likely to die from a cesarean delivery than from a vaginal delivery.  This should not be taken lightly to accommodate the schedules of mothers or doctors.

But the issue of c-sections aside, even "standard" medical interventions such as the use of pitocin and epidurals come with a host of risks (read this excellent article to find out more details). The unfortunate reality is that we have created a system in this country where one medical intervention leads to another.  Often, just showing up at a hospital to birth your baby is cause enough to start the chain of interventions.  If labor isn't "progressing" according to the desires of the doctors or hospital protocol (this does vary among practitioners and hospitals, so it's a good question to ask when choosing a birthing location) then pitocin is administered to speed up contractions.  Unfortunately, pitocin generally causes very intense and painful contractions, that frequently don't let up the way natural contractions do.  Withstanding the pain of pitocin-induced contractions without pain meds is a feat indeed (yeah, Brook!) but most women understandably then ask for an epidural, which numbs the pain, but incidentally slows down labor, often leading to the need to up the pitocin levels, or, if labor is really stalled, an "emergency" c-section.  What a sad cycle!

The saddest part of it all is that birth is an inherently empowering, life-changing experience for women, and this is being handed over to the "experts."  When did a woman's body cease to be the expert on birthing her own baby?  What is the price we are willing to pay for this "expertise"?  Where is the feminist outrage that we are being "manhandled" by the powerful medical lobby?  Of course, it isn't all doom and gloom.  Women all across our country are choosing to birth their own way, be it in the comfort and safety of their own homes, in a free-standing birth center, or bravely birthing mindfully in a hospital setting.  Many smaller hospitals are more birth-friendly, such as the incredible hospital where Clara was supposed to be born and where my nephew(!) will be born this summer.  Many hospitals are developing homey birthing centers where you can be attended by a Certified Nurse Midwife, rather than an OB.  (A woman interviewed in The Business of Being Born points out that Obstetricians are trained as surgeons and specialists in childbirth pathology or illness, and receive little to no education in healthy, normal births.  It is wonderful to have an Obstetrician on hand to handle emergencies, but there is no reason that they should be attending normal births!)  Birth can be an exhilarating experience for the mother, that leaves her feeling powerful and charged with the brain chemicals and hormones that are only released through a vaginal birth.  These chemicals and hormones provide her with a strong sense of love and protection for her child, and give her an adrenaline rush that gives her the strength to keep going after the exhausting birth experience.  Being medicated out of this experience should not be done casually or routinely.  I love the picture below and the look of pure ecstasy and wonder on the mother's face.  When I think about my own traumatic birth experience, pictures like this make me cry!   Oh, what a miracle birth is, medical or not!  But there is a unique magic to normal birth that is not replicated through medical intervention...

So, that was my long explanation of why you should check out the challenging, inspiring, moving and funny new film, The Business of Being Born.  As the tag line says, you'll never look at birth the same way again!  Take a look at the trailer, below:

Ode to a clothes line.

Ah, the simple pleasures of spring.  Yes, spring:  it's really, truly here.  I hung my laundry out twice this week.  Oh joy of joys...  THIS is what makes life worth living!  Okay, so that's dramatic language, I know, but hanging laundry on the line is something that makes me deeply glad.  For one thing, it's such a simple act of resistance to our reliance on extractive energy technology.  It takes neither coal strip-mined from Appalachia nor oil taken from the Middle East, both at great personal, economic and ecological cost, to dry my laundry on the line.  I LOVE things that are free!  And while we're talking about saving money, hanging your clothes to dry makes them last longer.  (All that lint in your dryer screen?  That's your clothes breaking down under the stress of being tumble dried.)  For another thing, it's just plain FUN, and it's something that Little C can help out with.  We set up the drying rack (which gets used by the wood-stove in the winter) in the sun, and Little C puts all her underpants, socks and other small items on there while I hang the larger stuff on the line overhead.  And the aesthetic experience of the colors against the spring blue sky...  It just makes me happy, plain and simple.

Apparently I'm not the only one.  There is a thriving underground laundry scene, with people subversively hanging laundry illegally in the backyards of their suburban McMansions in gated communities.  This short and entertaining NY Times article chronicles the adventures of one suburban mom hanging her laundry out.  Check out the non-profit organization Project Laundry List for more detailed information on the environmental benefits of hanging your clothes outside. 

So here's a rallying cry to all those laundry-hangers among us...  Have fun hanging in the sun--it's good for you, your clothes and the environment!  And remember, household chores should be enjoyed!

Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in the free republic for which it stands.

My good friend Eden has a wonderful post on her blog highlighting some devastatingly unfair government restrictions of small family farms, and the value of protest.  If you are a reader of this blog, you know that food is a justice issue for me, one that I feel very passionate about.  There is a groundswell of interest right now in safe, healthy food that does not destroy the environment in it's production and distribution, thanks in part to books like Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Michael Pollen's The Omnivore's Dilemma.  And yet our government, in the form of The Farm Bill and other means, actively works to restrict small, diversified farms, choosing instead to subsidize corn, soy, rice, wheat and cotton, all highly extractive and grown mainly by huge agribusinesses.  I can't go into it all here, now.  Check out the Sustainable Table web site for more information.  The New York Times article that Eden links to is a short introduction to the lunacy of our nation's farm policy.  I'm also including a short letter to the editor from our local paper that concludes with a powerful quote (emphasis mine):

Do You Know Where Your Meat Comes From?
Letter to the Editor, Concord Monitor, February 28, 2008

Last week an undercover video taken by the Humane Society at a California slaughterhouse received a lot of attention. I hope those who saw it will give some thought to the real cost of the inexpensive meat we buy in supermarkets.

In the video, a live, conscious cow that was too sick to walk was dropped headfirst from a forklift from a height of 5 or 6 feet. The rest of the video can be viewed on the Humane Society website, hsus.org. According to the Humane Society, it shows workers "kicking cows, ramming them with the blades of a forklift, jabbing them in the eyes, applying painful electrical shocks and even torturing them with a hose and water in attempts to force sick or injured animals to walk to slaughter."

We would be naive to accept the beef industry's claim that this sort of abuse is an isolated incident in an industry that is more or less un-policed.

It is painful to learn about this kind of misery and feel powerless to stop it, and to see New Hampshire lawmakers reject bills such as HB 1522, which would prohibit the confinement of animals so that they cannot move freely.

But there are a few things we can do, like visiting factoryfarming.com to find out what's going on in factory farms and buying our meat at stores like the Concord Co-op, where meat from local farms is sold. As Matthew Scully, a former speech writer for President Bush points out, while none of us wants to know how our meat gets to the dinner table, if we consider ourselves moral beings we have a responsibility to find out.

KAY McCALLION

It is a falsehood that there is nothing we can do.  Our dollars are our vote.  We can send a powerful message to the government about where we want our food to come from, though we might not be able to change policy.  But we need to continue to resist in any way we can, for the most important thing is to maintain our own integrity, our own physical and spiritual health.  Success is not our goal as much as sanity is.  Eden's post quotes a powerful passage from Wendell Berry along these lines:

Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone's individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence...

So here's to not acquiescing.  I'd love to hear about your own acts of resistance, whatever they may be...

 

Not that I'm a raw milk junkie, but...

Here's another article from last Saturday's Boston Globe about raw milk!  It's always nice to see positive press for something that gets such bad press most of the time.  Also, Ben linked to a fascinating article about the disappearance of bee populations that has major implications for our food supply (as bees play such an important role in pollination.)  Thanks for the link Ben, and it can be found in the comments section of my previous post.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver

I've been wanting to write more about this book for a while now, and am not entirely sure how to do it.  Quite simply, this book covered so much ground, and it was so thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish, it's difficult to cull out highlights.  At it's heart it is the story of one family as they attempted to "wring the petroleum from their food supply" (more on that here) by buying all of their food for one year from local producers or growing it themselves.  It is a wonderful combination of personal narrative, well-researched facts, cooking and gardening tips, hilarious insights into family life, ecological wisdom, an ode to rural life (though not a sentimental one) and a stirring call to action.  Barbara Kingsolver is at her best in this type of material, though I confess to loving her fiction as well.  She really lays out the case for why our current food habits are not only bad for us, but bad for the economy, bad for family farms, bad for the environment, and bad for the future of our planet.  Pretty much, they're only good for large corporations like Monsanto.  Kingsolver's training is as an environmental biologist, and her science background comes through in her writing.  She is very thorough as she builds her case, but winsome, too.  Ultimately, she concludes that the irony of making our eating practices more sustainable is that it is anything but deprivation:

Doing the right thing, in this case, is not about abstinence-only, throwing out bread, tightening your belt, wearing a fake leather belt, or dragging around feeling righteous and gloomy.  Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure.  Why resist that?

People will write her off as being too extreme or naive or elitist.  Let me assure you, she is not remotely extreme.  Her family chooses their "splurges" such as coffee, olive oil, whole wheat flour from Vermont, dried fruit, hot chocolate.  I found her perspective to much more "down to earth" (literally) and common-sensical than what we usually hear about food supply.  She exposes the insanity of our unsustainable and in-humane consumption patterns.  As she says, "Pushing a refrigerated green vegetable from one end of the earth to another is, let's face it, a bizarre use of fuel!"  The Kingsolver/Hopp family's project hinges mostly on hard work and restraint, qualities that should not be considered extreme under any circumstances.

The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude.  The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint--virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy.  These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in face, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans.  Furthermore, we apply them selectively:  browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example.  Only if they wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value.  "Blah blah blah," hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can't even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now.  We're raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by wholesale desires.

What could possibly be elitist about mucking around in your own backyard growing tomatoes and "processing" chickens?  Somehow "organic" has come to be equated with "snobby" but it's how the entire human race has survived for millennia!  What we have failed to realize is that the artificially low prices we "enjoy" at the supermarket (deflated by government subsidies and monopolies of agribusinesses) are costing us hugely in environmental degradation and health care costs.  When Kingslover comments on the novelty of enjoying fresh raspberries in the middle of winter, her host replies, "This is New York!  We can get anything we want, any day of the year."  Kingsolver insightfully muses (emphasis mine):

    So it is,  And I don't wish to be ungracious, but we get it at a price.  Most of that is not measured in money, but in untallied debts that will be paid by our children in the currency of extinctions, economic unravellings, and global climate change.  I do know it's impolite to raise such objections at the dinner table.  Seven raspberries are not (I'll try to explain to my grandkids) the end of the world.  I ate them and said "Thank you."
    Human manners are wildly inconsistent; plenty of people before me have said so.  But this one takes the cake:  the manner in which we're allowed to steal from future generations, while commanding them not to do that to us, and rolling our eyes at anyone who is tediously PC enough to point this out.  The conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners.
    Our culture is not unacquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity.  We're just particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods.  Generally unacceptable reasons: environmental destruction, energy waste, the poisoning of workers.  Acceptable: its prohibited by a holy text.  Set down a platter of country ham in front of a rabbi, an imam, and a Buddhist monk, and you may have just conjured three different visions of damnation.  Guests with high blood pressure may add a fourth.  Is it such a stretch, then, to make moral choices about food based on the global consequences of its production and transport?  In a country where 5 percent of the world's population glugs down a quarter of all the fuel, also belching out that much of the world's waste and pollution, we've apparently made big choices about consumption.  They could be up for review.

Okay, it's time for me to stop illegally quoting huge portions of the text and go to bed.  It's way past my bed time, and I'm losing my ability to be cogent.  Did you get the message that I loved that book and that I think it's an important read for anyone who cares about food or the future?  It's pretty popular right now, and I guarantee you can pick up a copy at your local library.  Here is a delightful review by my friend Byron Borger who owns a bookstore and is a wonderful choice of someone to support other than the conglomerate, Amazon.  I'll close with this quote about what we have to lose when choosing local:

Concentrating on local foods means thinking of fruit invariably as the product of an orchard, and a winter squash as the fruit of an early-winter farm.  It's a strategy that will keep grocery money in the neighborhood, where it gets recycled into your own school system and local businesses.  The green spaces surrounding your town stay green and farmers who live nearby get to grow more food next year, for you.  But before any of that, it's a win-win strategy for anyone with taste buds.  It begins with rethinking a position that is only superficially about deprivation.  Citizens of frosty worlds unite, and think about marching past the off-season fruits: you have nothing to lose but mealy, juiceless, rock-hard and refusing to ripen.

For more information, check out their website which has tons of resources for eating locally, excerpts from the book, responses from readers, and recipes for eating in season.

My Heroes I: Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry is one of my heroes.  I can still remember the first time I heard of Wendell Berry:  It was the end of a very long and painful semester that I spent in San Francisco when I was in college.  I had spent much of my time at the Westmont College Urban Studies program (an excellent program, by the way) feeling very isolated and alone, and not entirely sure of who I was and what I was doing there.  A fellow mis-fit student read a poem by Wendell Berry on our final class meeting at the close of the semester, and I just sat their at my desk with tears on my cheeks.  Somehow, I felt less alone, and Wendell Berry has been helping me to feel more sane and more grounded ever since.

Here's a link to the text of Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front. It still gets me every time.  The line "Be joyful though you have considered all the facts" is one of my mantras.

Another poem of his that I love is called "The Peace of Wild Things."

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

  — Wendell Berry

I have devoured and loved many of his books, particularly Jayber Crow, Hannah Coulter, Fidelity, What Are People For? and Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community.  His writing on the current political and ecological situation in America is prophetic and challenging.  The image I've included is a portrait by Robert Shetterly, the artist behind the brilliant series entilted "Americans Who Tell the Truth."  Each portrait in the series includes a quote.  Wendell Berry's entry, which includes multiple quotes of his and a biography, can be found here.  The quote chosen for Berry's portrait says: 

The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and wasteful.

 

I can't think of a truer statement.

Wendell Berry challenges me to join into a "membership" of inter-reliance with my neighbors and the land.  He helps me think "outside the box" of what the word "economy" means, and how I might be a more true and fair steward of my local economy.  He reminds me of what it looks like to love this country of America so much that I will not let my voice of outrage be silenced.  He is uniquely able to pierce through the hazy dream that the culture of materialism and apathy has lulled me into, and rouse me not only to protest, but to dance as well. 

For an excellent collection of Berry's writings that are available on the web, check out this site (unauthorized, as Mr. Berry is outspoken in his dislike of computers).  An excellent chapter of his book Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community can be found here:  "Christianity and the Survival of Creation."  Another favorite of mine is taken from the same book, "Peaceableness Toward Enemies."  It was written in response to the first Gulf War, but is every bit as pertinent today.