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Issue #15: Spring 2007, On Common Ground

Covering It:
On Common Ground, by Kylie Loynd
With turquoise water, soft coral-sand beaches and access to nearby ancient ruins, Playa del Carmen, Mexico, was a dream destination for our friends' wedding. I imagined my rusty Spanish improving quickly enough while in conversation to immerse myself in the local culture. Reality was sobering. In five days, I had exactly three brief exchanges with residents that reached deeper than surface level. My intentions were good, but I had forgotten the key to connection: courage to reach across the seeming divide.

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Whole Foods:
Beat the Breakfast Blues, by Sarojni Mehta-Lissak
When faced with the same predictable bowl of cereal each morning, anyone would yawn. Even the many high-fiber, low-carb, whole-grain choices can get old. But breakfast need not be meager or monotonous. In fact, it can be a health-promoting meal, rich with variety — especially when infused with ideas borrowed from other culinary traditions.

Soy Many Choices, by Cynthia Lair
I don't know how many of you have read Michael Pollan's excellent book The Omnivore's Dilemma (Penguin Press, 2006), but he makes some insightful points about America's "national eating disorder." He observes that Americans tend to choose their daily bread according to the latest nutritional research or fad rather than a deep-rooted culinary tradition. A prime example of this is the soy craze. I teach classes on food and nutrition for parents, and in almost every class, one or two people raise their hands to proudly tell me they give their children soy milk, not cow's milk. My concern is not so much about what they are choosing but whether they have sound reasons for making the choice. So their faces fall as I remain nonplussed and ask, "Why? (read the complete article)

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A Balance of Health:
A Better Water Bottle, by Lee Revere
I used to be proud of the fact that I bought bottled water. But it didn't take me long to realize that all of those little plastic bottles had to be recycled. And while I was recycling my bottles, I knew that many were ending up in the trash. Then, a few years back, I also read that the quality of water in those single-use bottles is sometimes worse than tap water. I thought I'd solve both problems by washing and reusing them. Only then did I learn that improper washing of PET bottles could leave behind harmful bacteria or cause them to leach potentially toxic chemicals. I was almost ready to give up. (read the complete article)

Bent Bikes, by Susan Peterson Gateley
Despite the benefits of exercise being relentlessly extolled by just about every imaginable source from T-shirts to the World Wide Web, my derriere was firmly planted on the driver's seat of my trusty automobile until six years ago. Then, like millions of aging baby boomers across North America, my spouse and I had an epiphany: "We gotta start exercising!" We decided to try cycling.

Sinusitis, by Dr. David Ramaley
According to the Alternative Medicine Review, approximately 14 percent of the population suffers from sinusitis. While sinusitis may not be on the front burner for you, the symptoms can greatly decrease the quality of life of those who suffer from it. People who have sinusitis experience one of two types: acute or chronic. (read the complete article)

Everything Herbal:
Lemon Balm for Life, by Kylie Loynd
Spring glides in with all the simple grace and subtle humor of a country two-step: one step forward and two steps back. Enticed by bouts of sunshine, we prepare our garden or plan a hike, only to wake the next day to cold, driving rain. My life can feel like that too when the plans I make surge, then stall, and my moods ride along with them. Herbalist Sally King offers me lemon balm, a sweet-tasting herb to lift my spirits above bouts of everyday blues: "When I think of lemon balm, I think of joy," she says, handing me a steaming cup of the tea. Along with its ability to support our journey through life's ups and downs, this fragrant plant also soothes the digestive system and strengthens the heart and the immune system. With its antiviral, antibacterial and antiseptic qualities, lemon balm provides multiple ways to enhance our health. (read the complete article)

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From the Ground Up:
An Orchard in the City, by Marian Wineman
When we moved out of our last home, I regretted losing our huge fall crop of Gravenstein apples and Asian pears. The idea of a winter without homemade applesauce - warmed up, with a dab of butterscotch on top - sent me into withdrawal. So we had barely settled into our new home when we broke ground to create an orchard of five fruit trees: apple, plum, fig, pear and cherry.

Musings:
Second Chances, by John Dreyer
I am a critter relocator. I have been my entire life. In the morning, when I walk up the driveway, which is still wet from the sprinklers, there are invariably half-a-dozen red worms crawling on the cement. I want to ask them why they would leave perfectly green grass for this hard, raspy surface. Surely they make easier pickings for the early birds here than in the weaving of the St. Augustine runners. I ask them whether they know that within the hour, the California sun will dehydrate them so that they are nothing more than squiggles on the concrete. But they are silent. So I pick them up and toss them back on the grass, giving them a chance at survival. (read the complete article)

The Big Turn-Off, by Lisa Romeo
I am stretched out on my dentist's fully reclining chair, and the hygienist clips the blue paper-towel bib around my neck, as usual. Then she reaches across me and swings a 15-inch television to within 10 inches of my face. "What shall we watch today?" she asks with a big smile.

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This Spinning Earth:
Graywater in the Garden, by Marian Wineman
As I write this, the rain pounds on the windows, and the mud thickens in our yard. It's difficult to tell my daughter not to waste water washing her celery when we have just broken the record for the rainiest November in Seattle's history. While the thought of a drought seems remote to me today, even here with our short but dry summers, water needs to be conserved. (read the complete article)

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Musings:
One Strong Heart, by Patti Pitcher
Beth Bosquerolli is one of my heroes; I met her while traveling in rural Brazil. The owner of the hotel, or pousada, where I have stayed a few times, Beth is always running in and out, doing errands, solving problems. She seems to appear mysteriously with herbs and healers to treat sick guests in the middle of the night and thinks nothing of driving an hour to exchange money for her guests. On the way out to her farm to deliver the hotel's compost to her pigs, Beth is likely to ask a visiting child if she'd like to come meet the pigs and see the horses. Her day is filled with a series of small actions which, when taken together, make for a life of kindness.

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Continuance, by Kerstin Barker
My wise uncle always used to tell this old Native story that I could never figure out. According to the story, there was a young girl in the Lakota tribe who was the best at everything that anyone, boy or girl, had ever been. She rode horses the best, sewed the best, shot arrows the best and so on. People dreamed about what she would become: a great warrioress, a prophet? She set out one day to explore the world and discover her role in life. She was gone a very long time. When she finally returned to her village, she was a grown woman and had seen and done many things.

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Treading Lightly:
Waste Not, Want Not: Zero Waste Model, by Lisa Tiffin
Having grown up less than a mile away from our county fairgrounds, I was used to the sight of a virtual wasteland of blowing trash and the leftover residue from thousands of people. In contrast, this past fall I was able to attend the Common Ground Country Fair held in Unity, Maine. The fair, a mix of old-fashioned values, education about locally grown organic foods and new ideas on earth-friendly practices, is unique because, although it attracts between 40,000 and 70,000 people each year, the waste left behind is virtually zero.

Life Out Loud:
I Swore I'd Never Say That, by Patty Wipfler and Julianne Idleman
Becoming parents challenges us right down to our bones. Our children evoke deep tenderness and delight and bring out an energy and protectiveness in us that we didn't know we had. But the realities of sleep deprivation and the anxiety of unfamiliar roles and tasks give rise to another powerful set of emotions, as we continually adjust to the lifestyle of being a parent. It's an enormous task, one most of us take on with little preparation or training. Who could have prepared us for our infants' frantic squalling, which brings even those of us who previously ran with wolves to frustrated tears of our own? And the challenge continues for the rest of our lives — from our children's tantrums and their first day of school to dating and college entrance exams. (read the complete article)

Looking Within:
Wheels, by Leslie Bannatyne
My daughter and I were creeping along at about 5 mph in the parking lot behind her pediatrician's office. She was plenty tall enough to reach the pedals - at 15, Maggie was already much taller than me - but this was the very first time she was in the driver's seat and I was her passenger. She drove like an old man, barely inching our banged-up Ford Focus along the asphalt, grinning from ear to ear, her hands clamped on the steering wheel in terror. Turns out, my girl loved wheels.

Twice the Charm, by Marie Richmond
My fixation with thrift stores began when I was a teenager. Before then, the thought of wearing anonymous castoffs was just plain gross. But when my older sister, Nici, went away to college, something shifted. She began wearing an eclectic mix of secondhand duds and items she scavenged from the "free box" at her local Laundromat. I was 16, at the peak of teenage fashion exploration, and in my eyes, my older sister was a fashion maven. I enthusiastically followed her lead, and thus began my love affair with used stuff. Starting with clothing, it later grew to encompass household items and books.

The Power of Magical Thinking, by Jeremy Adam Smith
For the first year of my son's life, my income was the sole means of support for our family. Unfortunately, I hated my job. After I resigned, I sent out a few desultory resumes, but it didn't take long for me to realize that what I really wanted to do was spend more time with my son. My wife went back to work, but the income from her job wasn't enough to support the three of us. I would freelance and consult, but there were no guarantees. In the middle of anxiously sleepless nights, I envisioned us homeless, forced to live with relatives. (read the complete article)

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In Print (book reviews):
Recovering Autistic Children, reviewed by Helen Landalf
My brother Mark is autistic. He wore diapers at age seven and didn't speak till he was eight. My parents were told to institutionalize him. Spurred on by his refusal to accept that his son's situation was hopeless, my father, Dr. Bernard Rimland, began a lifelong search for answers. When Mark was diagnosed, autism was relatively rare. Today, its incidence is reaching epidemic proportions. (read the complete article)

Backing Out:
Neighbor to Neighbor, by Lee Revere, Editor
We've been hit hard in the Pacific Northwest. This past fall and winter, our tumultuous weather included floods and a snowstorm, followed within weeks by raging winds - each of record proportions. The windstorm in particular caused extended power outages for more than a million Washington residents. With so many affected, I couldn't help but think about the importance of community.

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