In this period I’m focused on the climate, soil health, ecosystems and systemic thinking, and my sketches reflect just that. I spend my time learning about the connections between humans and nature and how, in practice, we can cooperate with living systems to improve environmental resilience and restore balance. I’m also interested in understanding how our thinking (of separation, domination, linearity, reductionism, and simple cause and effect) influences the actions that have such a disruptive effect on nature and other human beings, and how we can make better decisions.
April 3rd, Wednesday
General meeting of 350.0rg in Seattle. This is a monthly community event with potluck, talks, and activity planning. I spent some time talking to a person who reached out to me on Instagram after seeing my sketch of the hearing for Fossil fuel free King County. After the potluck and some singing, we heard about Go Green, a climate justice organization in Seattle and then talked about planning and participation in current actions. I love those people and how much they care about our present and our future.
April 9, Tuesday
I sketched the toy tractor at Bradner Gardens Park before my last lesson of the intensive organic gardening class offered by the Tilth Alliance. I loved the class, especially the 5-hour hands-on Saturday classes in which we mulched, seeded, transplanted, and made hot compost.
April 10, Wednesday
Talking about systemic thinking I’m re-reading Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an ecology of mind thirty years later. I found out that his youngest daughter Nora Bateson made a documentary on him and his ideas. I watched it, twice, and I sketched some of the people in the documentary, like Mary Catherine Bateson and Fitjof Capra.
Bateson took the extreme position that we are nothing more than relationship and that “things” don’t exist and cannot be understood in isolation. I always had a feeling that his thought has a strong Buddhist scent, and I recently stumbled in this series of lecture offered by Tricycle and led by John Dunne on “The essence of awakening.” They focus on the concept of emptiness, which, to me, is so so similar to what Gregory Bateson what talking about, even though he tended to quote Alice in wonderland rather than the Sutras.
April 11, Thursday
And talking about soil health, I love the work that Kiss the Ground is doing on evangelizing the role of soil biology in the carbon cycle (I read the book and I took a course on “soil advocacy” with them). I made this sketch while listening to a workshop on urban composting they organized on Thursday.
April 12, Friday
In a break from soil and philosophy, we had family visiting on Friday and Saturday, and we went to eat dinner at Chinook’s in Salmon Bay and lunch at Pete’s Eggnest in Greenwood
