Poetry of the Earth

This Earth Day has me thinking about the amazing details and oddities of the world around us. When NPR reminded me that April is National Poetry month, I immediately thought of a poem by one of my favorite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, on that very subject.

Pied Beauty

GLORY be to God for dappled things—

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

While I don’t see many trout, rose-moled or otherwise, where I live, I do appreciate the wildflowers popping up all over, the new bird calls that have been added in the last month as species head north, and the rain falling outside my window. Thinking about the details makes me want to protect them all. What particulars speak to your heart? How do you want to protect them this year?

I hope you and your family find many wonderful things to celebrate in the world surrounding you. Happy Earth Day!

Business Review: Monument Cafe

Monument Cafe in Georgetown, Texas

One of the most personally satisfying benefits of moving our spending more towards local businesses has been discovering some truly fun places. Topping our list is dining at the Monument Cafe.

The Monument Cafe in located in a beautiful building in Georgetown, Texas. Surrounded by raised beds and gardens, the sleek mid-Century modern building reminds me of a happier version of Hopper’s Nighthawks. When we are there, I expect to see men in fedoras to stroll in and sit at the counter. The simple decor makes the inside feel very restful and calm.

The food is equally pleasurable. We’ve been there several times over the last few months and have enjoyed everything we have ordered. The restaurant serves “locally-grown and organic vegetables, meat, and dairy to the greatest extent possible.” In addition to the food grown around the restaurant, the ingredients come from a network of local farmers developed over the restaurant’s seven year history. And the chefs are always experimenting with new ways to expand the local, organic options. Just recently, homemade ice cream was added to the menu! Read more

Deciding to Decide

This month the APLS Blog Carnival is focused on decision making. Deciding to live a sustainable life is a big decision, which is made harder by the fact that is then followed by many smaller choices. How do people decide where to focus their time and energy? What are those areas of focus? And what drops off in the meantime? Below are my (past and current) answers; be sure to check The Good Life on March 18 to read about the decisions others have made.

When my family first made a conscious decision to live a greener, more sustainable life, it was made up of only two people – my husband and me. At that point our top priority was saving money so we could pay off our debt. For us that meant scaling back across the board, exploring the world of thrift stores and used cars, and finding hobbies that didn’t involve expenditures. Having such a clear cut objective made lots of decisions easy and helped us make many of changes to our life. Read more

Maintaining Green Motivation in the Workplace

This post is my submission to February’s APLS Blog Carnival. This month’s topic is how to stay motivated about green living. Check Going Green Mama on February 24 for the carnival round-up and lots of great ideas to keep your motivation levels high.

Recently I posted about the changes to our family’s life, which led to some changes for Greening Families. With the launch of my husband’s business, we have made the switch to complete self-employment, something we have been working toward for years. We are already reaping benefits in terms of flexible schedules (we both attended our daughters’ Valentine’s Day parties at school with zero guilt – amazing!) but the change has also meant longer-than-normal hours for me over the last few months as Rich’s business – and income – got off the ground.

When I am racing a deadline, I sometimes have a hard time maintaining my motivation for green habits, especially the ones that take a little extra time. Since I know many others are starting or growing their own businesses these days, I wanted to share some tips to maintaining green motivation in the workplace. (I also wanted to encourage myself to keep following the green path so this article itself is a form of self-motivation!) Here are my top twelve tips for greening your home office: Read more

Simple Changes for Healthier Eating

Photo by chrissi

After posting an earlier article on how to afford organic food, I realized that it may have given the impression that I believe organic food is healthy food. I do believe, based upon loads of research (like this and this) and my family’s own experiences, that organic food is healthier than non-organic options of the same items.

However, I don’t believe that organic = healthy. A diet of chips and cookies is not high quality nutrition, even if the chips are made with organically grown potatoes and the cookies contain only unrefined sweeteners. Choosing organic food is only one consideration of many for healthier eating.

It can seem like eating healthier is amazing complicated but there are some simple changes you and your family can make that will have you all eating healthier soon. Here are a few: Read more

Family Friendly Ways to Save Energy

Image by hortongrou

Like many people, we’ve been reviewing all our bills and looking for ways to reduce our spending wherever possible. Since we’re also trying to reduce our use of nonrenewable resources, finding ways to save energy are bonus items. The Koala Sisters (aka our daughters) got into the act so we bring you four family friendly ways to save energy. Read more

I Want to Eat Organic Food But How Can I Afford It?

Photo by lusi

January is a time for resolutions, many of which focus on health and finances. To help people get off to a good start on their goals this year, I want to discuss a topic that comes up frequently as we chat with other parents. How the heck is it possible to eat organic food when finances are tight?

We’ve been able to switch almost all of our food purchases to organic items without increasing the money we spend on food. Here is what helped us: Read more

Family Friday: For the Birds

Photo by chidsey

Lucas Miller begins the new year with another fun and inexpensive activity that will get you and your kids out into nature. The Christian Science Monitor’s gardening section recently shared planting advice in Annuals and Perennials that Attract Birds to Your Yard so, if you have wee ones, know you can also explore the world of birding by bringing nature to you. Read more

Thinking About Next Steps for Greening Families

Pondering the future of Greening Families...

The last several months have been exceedingly busy for my family. My business has been more in demand than ever. As someone who is self-employed, I always feel an internal pull to make hay while the sun shines since future projects (and thus future income) are never guaranteed. I’ve had additional reasons to do just that since Rich launched his own business with his partners in 2009, making our family completely self-employed. It is fair to say that switch caused my normally high level of concern about finances to go up a couple of levels!

We believed in the new business, obviously, but expected it would take some time for Rich’s work level to ramp up to a point where he would bring in much income. As a result I took virtually every job that came my way happily. Then things began to move faster than we had anticipated for KELL Partners and Rich’s work level went up significantly. There are start-up costs to cover so his income still hasn’t rebounded but everything looks promising. Suddenly Rich and I were both working very long hours and trading off caring for our daughters, pets, and home to give each other uninterrupted time to complete work projects.

We’re still in that zone and I anticipate being here for some months to come. We’re still working to green our life but right now I want to spend my free time with my daughters (and my hard working husband when our work stars align!) rather than more time with my computer. What does that mean for Greening Families?

I’ve really enjoyed writing this blog and helping others who are interested in greening their lives but need to cut back right now. I’ve decided to post here to once a week, on Fridays, until things settle down a bit. We also tackle the broader topic of sustainable living on Family Profits, so check for helpful information there as well.

Why do you read Greening Families? As part of my “working smarter” push, I want to make sure I’m hitting the topics you’re most interested in so please let me know how I can best help you green your family.

Our Journey to Green

This post is a submission to December’s APLS Blog Carnival. Read about the journeys others have taken and are currently taking at The Conscious Shopper, one of my favorite green blogs, on December 18.

We’re deep into goal setting for 2010 around here so the topic for December’s APLS Carnival fit into our ongoing discussions perfectly. Below is an overview of the main vehicles that led us to begin making changes to live a greener life. I’ll be reviewing our progress towards our 2009 goals and laying out our goals for 2010 in a future post.

Our journey began more than ten years ago with finances as the impetus. As I wrote on our sister site, Family Profits, when we met both Rich and I were carrying significant student loan and credit card debt. The total when we finally added it up (it took us a couple of years to work up the nerve) was more than $180,000 worth of debt. That’s right, we were $180,000 in the hole even after making payments for several years. Not a good place to be.

We knew we wanted to pay off all our debt. Since we worked mainly in nonprofit organizations, we weren’t bringing home the Big Bucks so had to learn how to be super frugal. One of the unanticipated benefits of living frugally was that it was also a green lifestyle. We didn’t buy much of anything and the few things we did buy were often used. We were all over Reduce and Reuse because those actions saved us tons of money but we began to love the difference it made to our impact on the environment as well.

The next leg of our journey was spurred by medical issues. A week before our wedding, a driver ran a red light and T-boned my car, narrowly missing a direct hit to the driver’s side door. My car was totaled and I was injured pretty badly. My recovery took more than a year and led us to explore complementary and alternative medicine. Rich gave it a try as well and soon discovered that his back pain, for which surgery had been recommended, completely disappeared when MSG was removed from his diet.

We began to pay close attention to the food we consumed and as a result made many changes to our diet. We switched first to less processed foods, then to whole foods, then to locally grown organic options. Our spending on food remained fairly constant during these switches, in large part because we traded “convenience” for healthier options. A host of green living topics were revealed to us through these changes and we’re now huge proponents of organic farming, local food options such as CSAs, and the Slow Food movement.

The decision to become parents sparked the next shift. There is nothing like being completely responsible for the health and welfare of another living creature to get one’s attention! The more we learned about fetal and child development, the more concerned we became about items that had alwasy seemed innocuous. From baby lotion to sippy cups, there were serious matters to consider at every turn. While scientists argued about potential long-term effects and “safe” levels of exposure to various chemicals and compounds, it was clear to us that our first job as parents was to protect our children and so evoked the Precautionary Principle whenever we weren’t sure what to do.

New changes, like storing food in glass containers and making our own cleaning supplies, were implemented. And it became clear that the journey to a greener life was one that could last our whole lives.

Now that our daughters are a little older, the lives lived by other families is becoming the driver of change for us. We want all children, human and animal, to have the chance to grow up healthy and strong. We’re talking a lot this month about what we can do to help make that a reality but I can already see that more alterations will be coming to our lives soon. And I can’t wait.

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