Eco-act 21-04: Garden Calendar!

We’re starting a community garden…but dispersed! As you may recall, we are aiming to get our community gardening at home (in any form!). Our hope is that tending to the earth would reconnect you to God and all of Creation, and that any surplus you grow could contribute to Union’s robust food ministries. (For more info on our vision for Eco-Faith in this next year, read more here).

Union Gardens

Read on for a nifty planting calendar

To start you off on your way, we’ve developed a Planting Calendar detailing the kinds of produce you can grow, when, and how to get them going. Additionally, in the “Union Weekly Use” column, we’ve listed the quantity needed for our weekly burrito roll, with current recipes in mind. Obviously, there are some blanks in that column! We would welcome any and all produce that you contribute and can either add them to burritos or distribute fresh produce to Compass House or LUV.

If you would like access to the spreadsheet itself, click here. Otherwise, feel free to download this picture to print out for your reference.

Let us know what tips or tricks you might have in the way of starts and prepping your soil for a fruitful harvest. And, we will be starting a What’s App group to share ideas and/or a monthly zoom chat on a Thursday night — stay tuned!

We’ll be prepping our gardens right alongside you. Happy planting!!

* Useful references: Food Grown Right, In Your Backyard, McCrate and Halm; The Maritime Northwest Garden Guide, Seattle Tilth

** Assuming approximate last frost date of April 15th, per Sky Nursery

Eco-Act 21:03: Preparing and Waiting—Ash Wednesday & Union Gardens

Lent is widely recognized as “a period of penitential preparation for Easter,” often marked by fasting and somber contemplation intended to focus our thoughts on Jesus’ impending death—and our own mortality. Gardening offers supporting images for this: the garden of Gethsemane, for example, or the reminder that our lives originated from the earth and will return to it.

But Lent also invites us to wait and prepare for resurrection and rebirth, and gardening offers rich imagery here: seeds placed into the earth emerging as new life … John 12:24 reminding us that “if the [kernel of wheat] falls to the ground and dies … it produces many seeds”—the plants which returned to dust in the fall return to life in the spring … and, as Hannah Brown notes in an article for Living Lent, Jesus was even mistaken for a gardener, in the garden by the tomb.

Brown links our climate crisis to the “lament-and-Gethsemane” aspect of Lent, but she also links it to rebirth and new life. And she observes that “Since the middle ages, it has been tradition for church communities to create an ‘Easter garden’ during Holy Week.” Hmmm… sounds a bit like Union Gardens!

Three final items to mention:

• Don’t forget the Bill Gates-Anderson Cooper conversation on climate change, Thursday night, February 18th

• You might enjoy this reflection on The Vegetable Garden and Lent (thosecatholicmen.com)

• · Stay tuned for more news on Union Gardens in the coming weeks!

Eco-act 21-02: Abundantly Overflowing

As we heard last week, Eco-Faith is growing in an exciting direction in this next year. And we want you along for the ride! Again, three focuses you can expect from us this year are: (1) occasional ideas of personal action that you can take to move toward climate healing; (2) climate-focused legislative initiatives that Union could actively support/engage in; and (3) Union Gardens, a socially distanced community garden that aims to grow produce to share with others in our wider community.

Today, we’ll be focusing on the possibility and impact of #3, Union Gardens. With the pandemic and all of the physical distancing that has come with it, our community has had to pivot to continue feeding our underserved and at-risk neighbors. We’ve rolled ~300 burritos almost every single Saturday (which get distributed as a hot, nutritious, personally wrapped meal to up to 7 different organizations per week). We’ve channeled tons of produce, canned and pantry goods, Farestart meals, and other items to LUV, Compass House Dexter, and other places. Our community has also cooked ~60 meals per week for Compass House residents and 40 meals for ICS clients weekly. And yet, with the pandemic continuing to increase income loss, poverty, hunger, and the housing crisis, — with a disproportionate impact on BIPOC folks compared to white folks — our community is even more in need of fresh produce and accessible food.

Union Gardens

Growing for our community

This spring and summer, if each of us took some time to pray, prepare, and tend to some dirt (in the backyard, on the porch, on the windowsill, in 415’s garden boxes), imagine what we might be able to create together! We could include more nutrients and greens in our meals and more sweet and abundant fruit for families and individuals in our city. We could save on some production costs while also growing local and offsetting emissions! And, when we are able to deliver fresh produce and burritos with ingredients from our gardens, our tangible care in the form of food says, “We see you and we care” AND “We’ve been thinking of you since the winter…with every weeding, watering, and harvest”.

As you prepare your own gardens now, looking toward spring and summer, would you consider planting a little extra for Union’s food ministry?

Right now, we are working on developing resources for when and what to plant, as well as how much we need. We will have more specifics soon, but we know our ministries currently use/need: red bell peppers, onions, greens of all kinds, garlic, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, carrots, and celery.

Again, we’ll have more on quantities and planting/growing tips soon (and we welcome your help and input as you’re interested)! We envision this as a type of victory garden experiment, and as a way to do something together while apart. We look forward to planting and growing with you this year — stay tuned for more!

Eco-act 21-01: a time to plant

Today we’re excited to begin our second season of eco-faith posts. Thanks for joining us! We’ll get started by planting seeds for three projects we hope to “cultivate” this season. Then we’ll talk a bit more about planting actual seeds to produce tangible crops that we can begin to harvest in the not-too-distant future. First, the projects.

1. Individual actions: Eco-Faith’s first season focused primarily on steps each of us can take on our own to care for the planet: diligent recycling, for example, or responsible disposal of electronic devices, or intentional repair/repurposing/gifting of items we no longer use, or regrowing scallions on windowsills—or even creating worm bins (!) to enhance soil quality. Ideas like these for earth-friendly individual actions will always crop up. So, for 2021 project #1, we will from time to time identify or revisit an individual action for your consideration. For example, last year we introduced Ridwell, a disposal service that handles non-recyclable food packaging and certain other plastics; batteries; clothes/fabric, shoes—and a “rotating” category for things such as strings of Christmas lights. Ten dollars/month provides a discreet outdoor collection bin and regular pick-up. We have now joined those of you who use this service to step up their recycling game conveniently and cost-effectively.

2. Climate change community actions: Even in the darkness overshadowing this post-election period, seeds of hope are being sown with respect to our physical world: the U.S. return to the Paris Climate Accord … General Motors’ decision to move away from fossil fuel-powered vehicles … the U.S.-hosted Earth Day Climate Summit … cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline Project …. In fact, all kinds of climate-friendly actions are being undertaken nationally and at the Washington state and King County levels as well. The future harvests that these actions promise are truly encouraging, but many workers will be needed to bring them in. So, our second project for this season will be looking more closely at various legislative initiatives to try to unearth specific opportunities for some or all of the Union community to actively support. Stay tuned!

3. Union Gardens: With the arrival of February, the gardening season quietly (and damply) begins. Time to clean up the garden beds, loosen and amend the soil, and think about what to grow this year. For serious gardeners, it’s also time to think about indoor starts—and actually to sow peas and spinach outdoors. In fact, before too many more weeks pass, it will be time to transfer starts or directly seed:

• Arugula

• Cabbage

• Cauliflower

• Celery

• Collards

• Kale

• Leeks

• Lettuce

• Onions

• Peas

• Potatoes

• Radishes

• Scallions

• Spinach

Eco-faith 2021 Directions

Individual Acts, Communal Acts, Union Gardens

In a post last October, we wondered …

“…next spring, what if everyone in the Union community who gardens, or who could garden, decided to plant extra tomatoes, or lettuce, or spinach, or onions, peppers, melons, squash, potatoes, …. Could we grow enough food to make a difference for someone else?”

Which leads to this question about a third project: Can Union members plant and manage a “socially-distanced community garden?” The idea would be to plant and grow enough veggies in the back yard, on the deck, in the pea patch, or wherever, for the enjoyment of the gardeners—AND someone else … some Lake Union Village residents, for example, or Union’s burrito-rolling team, ICS sandwich makers, Compass House residents, or ….

So, these are the three project “seeds” we want to plant with respect to Eco-Faith season two: (1) occasionally sharing ideas that Union members can implement on their own to benefit our physical world; (2) climate-focused legislative initiatives that Union could actively support/engage in; and (3) Union Gardens, a socially distanced community garden that aims to grow vegetables to share with others in our wider community.

As we get rolling in the coming weeks, we’ll be on the lookout for purposeful individual actions to share. We’ll be browsing legislative programs for community action opportunities. And we’ll be digging into the possibility of gardening for others as well as ourselves.

We would love to hear what you think about these ideas!

Eco-act 034: taking a Sabbath

What a year this has been kicking off our new Eco-faith ministry of acts of purpose and hope for climate healing. We have really enjoyed diving into these topics and the interrelated ways they intersect with our call to care for all of God’s Creation.

After many weeks of contributing to the Eco-faith blog, we’re taking a little time off to rest, regroup, and plan our next series! Though we will be pretty quiet on the blog for the next few weeks, we encourage you to reflect and re-member this last year. What have you learned? Have you integrated care for Creation into your faith praxis and discipleship?

While we are away, we welcome any feedback, questions, and topics that you want us to cover next. And finally, we offer this excerpt from Wendell Berry’s writing, "Sabbath as the Path to Creatureliness” for further Sabbath reflections.

Eco-act 033: love for God, creation, and one another

What has this Advent felt like to you? We hope you have been able to practice stopping, taking a deep breath, being attentive to the present moment, collecting your bearings, and living in gratitude for all of the gifts of this life — even just for a moment. As we finish out this 4th week of Advent in the midst of a very long year, we are dwelling on and in God’s great love — for all of Creation (including us!).

waiting + love

for climate healing

We believe love is an action, not just an intention or warm and fuzzy feeling. It is embodied by seeing, listening, and knowing, by sharing in belonging and mutual care. God’s love radically embodied and made known by Jesus actively demonstrates and models for us what are the possibilities of love and that this abundant, overflowing love is for all of Creation — human and non-human. It is a Cosmic love that does not shy away from the hard yet truthful realities around the injustices of oppression, greed, and death that pervade the earth but rather, because of love, works tirelessly and creatively toward furthering life. In our time, Jesus’ love calls us to recognize, pray for, and act on much of the climate chaos we find ourselves in, as directly related to capitalism, consumerism, environmental racism (in the extraction of natural resources and BIPOC labor, ideas, lives), and in our accounting of Christianity’s entanglement in all of this. And yet, we can look to Jesus, the Word, who sustains and furthers all of the Cosmos as our hope and continued reason to act (Hebrews 1:1-2:8).

So. What might waiting on, looking for, and acting in God’s great love look like for us in this somewhat dismal state of our climate crisis? For one, it might look like joining in with what the Spirit is doing to bring wholeness, healing, abundance, vibrance, creativity, truth, interdependency, and ultimately more life. We would point to the other blog posts we’ve done on Eco-faith because acting for climate healing is a lot of things…but really does come from God’s invitation to participate in love-in-action.

For some ideas to further your reflection on God’s love and climate healing, we encourage you to check out these organizations, resources, and practices:

• For the Love (Canada): this interfaith organization in Canada that “invites Canadian faith communities and faith-based organizations to come together under a unified banner to mobilize education, reflection, action and advocacy for climate” (homepage).

• Interfaith Power & Light: this group is similar to the organization above, but located in the United States. It builds movements amongst faith communities, especially in the policy realms.

• Earth Ministry: on a very local Seattle level, this group helps churches green their congregations, partners with IP&L above, and provides resources for advocacy in the ways of sustainable futures.

• Read this reflection about Wendell Berry’s view of love, health, and wholeness.

• Show your love for the earth and our communities by going on a nature gratitude walk, tending to your plot of earth, or supporting local food growers.

“I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world,” he writes. “I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.”

—Wendell Berry, “The Body and the Earth”

Eco-act 032: finding Advent joy in today’s physical world

We mark this coming Sunday, the third in Advent, with the lighting of the Joy candle. But when we think honestly about the current state and trajectory of our physical world, can we be entirely joyful? How do we hold both the reality of climate change and Advent joy?

A starting point might be to reflect for a moment on the notion of joy voiced by Henri Nouwen:

“Joy is not the same as happiness. We can be unhappy about many things, but joy can still be there because it comes from the knowledge of God’s love for us….”

Father Richard Rohr makes a similar point:

“… spiritual joy is something we participate in; it comes from elsewhere and flows through us. It has little or nothing to do with things going well in our own life….”

To these big ideas, we add two smaller thoughts of our own.

waiting + joy

for climate healing

First, we lament, we worry, not so much that climate change is happening at all—climate change has always happened—but that it is happening disproportionately, and in ways, in places, and at a pace fueled in part by human self-centeredness, indifference, denial and finally resignation. But because these are human behaviors, change is possible.

Secondly, to some extent anyway, creation is adaptable, resilient. Birds actually sing louder or softer depending on ambient noise levels. Ancient grains and biodiversity may help feed the world, should climate change threaten today’s mainstay food crop yields. And animals and crop-specific planting regions can migrate for viability; for example, some warm-weather wine grapes can now be grown farther north than in the past. Despite tidbits of good news like these, however, the bottom line remains the same: such adaptations cannot make climate change acceptable, or even bearable. They simply suggest that creation itself can act to “buy humans some time” to become better stewards. And anyway, all of this feels more like relief than joy…. How do we get to joy?

Maybe the answer rests in knowing that we have the chance to participate in environmental renewal; we get to be in solidarity with our natural world. Listen to Hildegard of Bingen: “Humankind, full of all creative possibilities, is God’s work. Humankind alone is called to assist God … to co-create. With nature’s help, humankind can set into creation all that is necessary and life-sustaining.” Now that is a big, joyous idea!

As we reflect on how to hold both joy and our concern for the environment in this season of waiting and preparing, here are a few final thoughts to consider: first, if you can, enjoy a good walk in nature, in your neighborhood or elsewhere (somewhere safe for you and others). Look and listen closely. Take a breath and take it all in. And as you walk …

• Commit to continue—or begin—your own pro-environment campaign in 2021 (your first New Year’s resolution!). While our individual efforts won’t save the environment, our absence from the battle will only make matters worse and set a bad example for others. And collectively, we can make significant contributions.

• Take a moment to start planning next year’s garden. Visualize the perfection of those flowers, tomatoes, lettuces … imagine the aroma of the basil and rosemary….

• Reflect on the conclusion of the above observation from Henri Nouwen: “Joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day. It is a choice based on the knowledge that we belong to God and have found in God our refuge and our safety and that nothing, not even death, can take God away from us.”

May you find joy in Advent, and Merry Christmas!