April as Earth Month

Looking back over any period of time there's lots of ways to evaluate it. But any way we look at it April has been a pretty glorious month for us. The biggest news of the month I'm not ready to reveal yet. But the rest I'll tell....




Mid-April brought the return of Saturday farmers markets in downtown Corvallis, along the riverfront. Courtney worked the HOUR Exchange booth at the Earth Fair, which was happening alongside the first market. Our dear dear buddies, Margot and Allen, were visiting from Pacific Grove. Luckily they had already been in Bend, OR, for a couple of weeks and toughened up. Because this was not the weather of the Monterey farmers market.




As soon as we got there it started to rain, then rain harder, then hail, then hail harder and the wind started blowing....and then the sun came out. That weather pattern continued for a while, and I was sure Margot and Allen would be ready to flee, but no! They were game for ducking under canopies and waiting out the storm and then strolling some more.




About the time we were thinking it was time to go, here came the Procession of the Species. Since the 90's I've heard of different towns having a Procession of the Species around Earth Day, but this is the first one I've ever seen.





I remember that there's three rules: no live pets, no motorized vehicles, and no amplified sound, but other than that it's pretty free-wheeling and so darned cute.

















Meanwhile Courtney attended a Sustainability Town Hall meeting that drew 600+ people. You gotta love a town where more than 600 people show up to give their input about how the community can move towards sustainability. People divided up into groups around specific topics--energy, transportation, water, neighborhood organizing, economic vitality. Lo and behold, Courtney joined up with the economic vitality committee and is now immersed in a whole new topic of study.

At Aaron's school in Eugene they had both Green Week and Walk & Roll Week. Instead of just celebrating Earth Day, they had a three day mini green festival, which included human-powered smoothies (bike blended!), workshops, info tables and discussions, a bicycle obstacle course, skateboard clinic and a helmet fitting booth with low-cost helmets! In the school paper they reminded the kids that "you get more miles per burrito (MPB) by choosing human power. So as the gas prices go up, remember to keep your carbon footprint low and come to school under your own steam." God bless 'em! (And I'm happy to say that Aaron gets to school by skateboard and home by city bus.)

I'll end with something that Courtney's brother Steve sent us. It pretty much says it all.

In celebration of Earth Day week: If the Earth were only a few feet in diameter, floating a few feet above a field somewhere, people would come from everywhere to marvel at it. People would walk around it, marveling at its big pools of water, or little pools and the water flowing between the pools. People would marvel at the bumps on it, and the holes in it, and they would marvel at the very thin layer of gas surrounding it and the water suspended in the gas. The people would marvel at the creatures walking around the surface of the ball, and at the creatures in the water.

The people would declare it as sacred because it was the only one, and they would protect it so that it would not be hurt. The ball would be the greatest wonder known, and people would come to pray to it, to be healed, to gain knowledge, to know beauty and to wonder how it could be. People would love it, and defend it with their lives because they would somehow know that their lives, their own roundness, could be nothing without it. If the Earth were only a few feet in diameter.

Let's all take that little bit of Earth worship with us wherever we go--keep it in our hearts and try to live by it.

Happy Earth Month, and may Spring bring you a renewed joy of life,

Valori