WCB: Blogging from Planet Earth

(From the 35mm vaults, Stuart on the sidewalk. My old tomcat who owned our home and garden from seventh grade through college.)

July 22nd, 2006, the cat reminded me…

I was a kid with home grown veggies, pies from our own cherry tree, eggs from our own chickens, and a compost bin long before you could head to Lowe’s and buy one pre-fab. We did pretty well on the environmental front, and I carried those lessons with me when I moved out on my own — for a while at least.

Thing is, I was surrounded by consumers who loved to consume. Consume and toss, consume and toss. It was college life in the Greed is Good era, and it was damned hard to not fall into it, lock step.

I pulled myself out when I made the transition from apartment to shared house, and then again, when I first lived in this place with its jungle of plums, figs, grapes, and berries. One year, I canned all the plums and made a tasty, spicy plum syrup. It was supposed to be jam, but I never quite got a handle on that pectin thing.

Then, for a long while, it all just slipped. I was tired. So tired and overworked, and I never had the funds or the time to do anything to the garden. I let it go, let my other efforts go, and I teetered perilously close to that 80s, trickle-down Uncle Ronnie love fest I hated so much. No. I’m not going to be like that. I hated it then, and I hate it now.

But dammit, I said, looking around at my clutter and chaos, it takes so much time and effort. It’s so hard and I’m still so very tired. And the money — good lord, all those rich people going greener-than-thou with their hybrid cars and their solar panels and their low VOC paint. I can’t afford any of that. Not even the paint.

Still, I wanted to do something — whatever I could — so very very much.

So, I started making lists of the small things. The little efforts I could afford, both in time and in money. And for a while, I thought, what’s the point. My efforts are microscopic. What good are they?

I knew my discouragement needed a good smack in the head, yet still I was discouraged.
(I still am, some days, but not today.)

Chopper joined me in thoughts, plans, and tiny deeds, and we were in turns optimistic and discouraged together, but never quite forward-thinking about any of it until we both got that head smack we needed when we took time last summer from our crazy tourist season schedule to head to the theater and watch An Inconvenient Truth.

Angry Cat took over the blog on an especially hot weekend just after to remind us all of how climate change mucks with the habitat of her furry friends to the North. She’s gone now, but we’ve got our sled mutt to keep the reminder alive in our house.

And we’ve been active. We take tiny steps where we need and bigger steps where we can. It’s microscopic, still. A drop in a monstrous bucket, but action of any kind is a hell of a lot better than inaction, or discouragement.

And now, looking ahead…

See the sparsely populated sidebars on Belly Timber’s front page? That’s a reminder to me as well: that we’re overdue for a shift in focus. The food’s not going away, nor are the occasional cats (in fact, we are knee deep in cat acquisition as I write this), but Belly Timber needs to reflect where we are with our lives, and right now our lives are about so much more than tripe, truffles, and checkered ravioli.

Not that I don’t still love those things, mind you. Not that we don’t still have a few crazy culinary ideas up our sleeves…

Just know that today — 07.07.07 — I’m not a food blogger and I’m not a cat blogger. I don’t know what to call myself just yet. Life blogger? Earth blogger?

Eh, how about just Blogger on Planet Earth. The only planet we’ve got.

Calculate your carbon footprint.
Take the Live Earth pledge.

(Check out the Weekend Cat Blogging: How To Beat The Heat! round up at What Did You Eat?)

This hairball was ralphed up on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 5:09 pm and is filed under obligatory cats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.