Christmas Tree Season

Today I saw maybe 15 trucks full of Christmas Trees on the highways between home and work. They were looking very rushed too. I got the impression that they were in a rush because vendors underestimated the number of Christmas trees that were needed for the season. They say that in hard economic times, it becomes even more important to folks to celebrate family traditions like Christmas.

The grape leaves have all fallen now, and frost covers the fields every morning, but harvesting is still happening in the Willamette Valley. There are still a few fields with lots of pumpkins left out to rot. It seems that the Christmas consumers on the West Coast are much more eager than the Halloween ones were. Either that, or it was a REALLY good year for pumpkins.

The patterns in my life are changing too, as harvest time winds down. Jimmy has started to work fewer and longer shifts, and he's no longer getting up at 5:30am. With him staying up later, I'm enjoying staying up a bit later too (as you might notice by the time stamped on this entry). I like the new schedule for many reasons. For one, I have only two or three weeknights a week that I have to cook for both ends of the meat-eating and non-meat eating spectrum. Since I have only a half time job, I have been trying to do most of the cooking, but it's challenging when you like to cook from scratch, and your kids are all very picky, and one is a vegetarian, while dad is a huge meat lover and mom is lactose intolerant.

Tonight I cooked for just the three kids, who all three happen to love mac and cheese. My first preseverative-filled dinner was a blast. Wow. That was easy! I only had to cut up some veggies and heat leftovers for myself while the pasta simmered. I like the challenge of cooking for my family a lot, actually, but after three nights in a row it gets hard. Now I have just a day or two at a time. That is perfect. The new schedule is great for another reason too--it gives me and Jim time alone on our two common days off, when the kids are at school. We haven't really met our goal of having twice-monthly dates since we have been married, so far, unless you count a one-hour escape to do some quick wine tasting up the street. Maybe now we'll at least get some relaxed lunch dates in.

Work is getting better for me now, too. Two students are becoming good friends, and when I walk through campus nowadays I often see two or three students with whom I've had a solid conversation, so when I smile at them, it is really sincere and not so awkward. It takes so long to build relationships! This weekend we are having a retreat at the beach, and for once, I'm not anxious about whether anyone will come or whether we'll have things to talk about if they do. Things are starting to feel natural, and organic.

By the time my daughter sees this entry on facebook, the secret will be out--we will have two new members added to our family tomorrow. They are two little boy Yorkie pups that we are buying the kids as an early Christmas present. It will be so fun and so chaotic around here for the next few weeks, while we get them trained. A great Christmas experience!

Yesterday I realized how wonderful it is to live in the country at Christmastime. I drove through four small towns, all of which had the same 40's era Christmas decorations--either wreaths, candy canes, or christmas tree shaped lit-fake-fir-garlands, hung high on electric poles and light posts. It was so charming and quaint, to see this variety of americana replacing traffic and strip malls that I always associated with Christmas before, having grown up in Clackamas, where most of my family still lives. No strip malls in my life any more. I am blessed. I'm excited to host my family's Christmas gathering out here in the country this year!

Planting and Politics

The grape leaves are all slowly turning a rusty brown color now, and the grapes have all been plucked. It's time to bundle up for the winter and stock up on lots of veggies and fruit at the produce stands that are closing down one by one, until Spring. I got some amazing deals at one yesterday. Thirty nine cent a pound apples, fifty cent a pound carrots and tomatoes and three red bell peppers for a dollar! I wish I had time to do some canning! Next year.

For the past couple of weekends I've been trying to get time to plant our leftover wedding favors--some Japanese Maple trees--in the yard, but opportunities keep coming up that get in my way... this past weekend the thing that came up was a work opportunity. A student that I've been getting to know, who heads up the Sustainability Club at Western invited me to a conference called "Powershift West" where students get together every other year to plan for campaigns and initiatives on campus that will educate and transform the way we work, eat and play ...and lobby our leaders. The conference covered progressive topics like land development, corporate power structure, and green energy, transporation and agriculture.

It was so good to be in the middle of a youth-led educational movement that addressed so many of my own interests. Some of the things that I'm hoping to look into more are: The Steady State Economy, The Global Footprint Network, the New Green Economy Conference, and the Move to Amend Campaign, which seeks to undo Corporate Personhood, which is a root cause and concern of the Occupy Movement, it seems. (Check out Annie Leonard's great cartoon-video "The Story of Citizens United." and while you're at it, today is the release of her new short video on US debt.)

Two weeks ago I had a tough call to make. I've been learning for years about Free Trade Agreements and the World Trade Organization and all of the bad that comes from this new globalized system of oppression that starts with wealthy western Multi-national Corporations and our banks and ends with stripping the lands of the globe of it's caring farmers and it's inherant value, dumping waste, and setting up factories everywhere that have no one to hold them accountable to being good to people or the land around them.

My least favorite stories about free trade exploitation come from the region where Taj's grandparents died, in Mexico. Human rights abuses are unending in Oxaca and the Southernmost parts of Mexico, where farmers have lost their ability to grow food for even themselves and their families, and when they unite to fight to get their land back in the way that has always worked before, they are killed with the weapons and mercinary training that come as part of a package deal from agreements made by the World Trade Organization. (The mercinary training part is why I have gone to the SOA Watch vigil in Fort Benning each of the last three Novembers--that's where Mexican soldiers come to get their training, as part of the package.)

I heard that Mexico's former president, Vicente Fox, was coming to the campus where I work, and I was compelled to raise my voice against his message in some way--this is a powerful man who became more powerful when he sold his own people into slavery through his cooperation with the World Trade Organization, and then he had the nerve to come to the place in the Willamette Valley where so many former Mexicans live and work and strive to become citizens because they want so desperately to get away from the effects of Free Trade in their homeland, and here he came, to show our business students about how "prosperous" free trade is, and all that it promises for our future as "united" North Americans. I was just sick whenever I saw the posters with his name and photo on them. And that so few people saw the incredible treatury in his words and actions made me want to shout and keep shouting.

I envisioned a vigil outside the hall where he was to speak. I spoke to a Sociology Professor that was interested in doing a demonstration too, and he said that he'd bring his whole class out in protest. I asked my supervisor what he thought about this idea. Having set up a non-violent demonstration-march on campus last Spring for MLK Junior Day, he liked it at first, but then on furthur consideration, thought it too extreme. He suggested a teach-in instead. I didn't fight him. I thought about how it would be hard for me too if I set up a vigil... I would have to cancel Taj's orthodontist appointment, and I thought about all of the school that she would miss if she didn't get her braces on the Veteran's Day Holiday as we had been scheduled to. I weighed her current struggle with her school work against her grandparents struggle to live, breath and hope, and I backed down.

Last Sunday we went to a new Friends church here in our town, and after the sermon, during the time of open sharing and silence, a man told a story of how God had moved him to act with compassion on a neighbor who had egged his guest's car. He said that he went over and washed the man's own dirty car because he felt that if he stopped listening to God's call to do these kinds of radical things, he might stop hearing them altogether. That was very profound to me. I know, you're thinking that I was feeling bad that I hadn't washed Vicente Fox's car, but really I was wondering if I had ignored God's call on my conscience, and if that would have consequences. And yet I know that God is not one who punishes. I know that if I was intended to start my career as a radical non-violent leader during Vicente Fox's visit to Oregon and chose not to because of two small obstacles, God will still keep working with me. So I'm letting it go.

It has been discouraging for me to be down here in the country when the Occupy movement is going on in Portland, but at the same time, I know that the Occupy movement is not one that I would do well with. I know that I would only be frustrated at the snail's pace of progress toward any kind of united set of goals or solutions that people of so many different backgrounds might really unite around. I know that the movement needs leaders, and I wonder sometimes if I couldn't help in that area, but I have to trust that there's a reason that I moved away right when it was starting up. I know that things like that don't happen randomly and accidentally. So I'm waiting to find some people that I can lead with where I am, and in the meantime I can keep supplying the Occupy movement with food and with prayer. This is hard, but I do feel that it is a call for me from God to be patient and wait for the right time and the right issue, just as I have waited for the right time to plant these trees--I won't let the time pass when it comes, and God won't let me, either.

When I was at the Powershift West conference, someone handed me a small flyer with information about a teach-in there at the U of O. That was encouraging. My supervisor had a good idea. That's something that I can work toward for now. Honestly, I don't think 98% of the studentbody of Western is any more ready to hear about my views on Vicente Fox than 98% of America is ready to run down and camp out in freezing weather as a way of envisioning a more effective democracy together.... probably both groups need to be lovingly educated quite a bit more. Maybe that is my call.