08 02 11 Local Relationships Open the World

In one of my older posts I commented on how being open to local relationships changes everything, even our personal economics. For instance, I noted that when our first batch of wine turned out to be more than a little disappointing, we were happy to find a neighbor who loved it. He was perfectly willing to trade us a dozen fresh eggs for every bottle of very poor wine. I suppose there is a bit of a Tom Sawyer-esque flavor to this story. Rather than pouring the wine out, we got someone else to actually give us something for it. But we really did tell him our opinion of it

first—and I have to admit that we are hardly wine experts, ourselves.

Two weeks ago, though, our local economy faced a small local calamity. A grizzly bear broke into our friend’s chicken coup and ate all the chickens. Our neighbor is very frustrated. He not only lost the chicke

ns, but also had a lot of damage to the chicken facility; it was pretty elaborate, even including an electric fence as bear protection. But we are frustrated, too. Not only do we not have eggs any more, but we were also collecting chicken manure and aging it as future fertilizer for our garden.

We certainly do need the chicken manure. This May I built the first two of a dozen vegetable garden boxes that will eventually frame all the outside edges of our deck. We only had time to build two boxes, so I only bought one pickup load of the local dirt mix that was advertised as “garden ready.” In fact, it was not garden ready. Our poor vegetables just aren’t going anywhere.

Of course we have compounded the problem, ourselves. In the spirit of living in a bioshelter, we are seeking a sustainable, post-petroleum way of living on our land. We have decided that we do not want to use petroleum-based, chemical fertilizer. As a result, fertilizer is more of a problem for us than for most gardeners.

Actually, the chicken manure should be very good for what we want, but chicken manure needs to age for a year, or it is rich and (I believe) unsanitary for what we want. We have a couple of bags of John’s pre-grizzly bear fertilizer aging nicely in our compost pile, and it should be ready for next year. Had our garden-ready dirt been up to snuff, we would be doing reasonably well this year, but we are not. So, we bit the bullet this weekend and went to a store rather than a neighbor to get some pre-aged chicken manure. As a result, we are very hopeful that there is still enough summer left for us to grow some very good salad this season.

Sharing stories like this in this blog has made clear to me one of the important human characteristics we all need to develop. People have the capacity to live locally, responding as well as possible to the fertilizer needs of the local earth, their near neighbors (and their chickens—or whatever), and the local wildlife, even grizzly bears. Yet, living in the local scene does not have to block out our awareness of the whole wide world that we live in. Because I live in the Eagle River valley, I have to appreciate the salmon that spawn in the river—even though the river attracts bears. I also have the opportunity to appreciate my neighbors, and to enter into relational exchanges that allow us to share some of life with them.

Yet, people can, and should, allow this awareness of the local environment and the people close to us to make us aware of how much more there is in the world than just the small community that we know. Indeed, knowing the people, plants, animals and environment in my own area opens me to concern about the wellbeing of the whole of creation.

This means that humans can live in two kinds of space at once. We can live in the space of our own personal lives and relationships, and we can also live in the space of openness to the whole world. If we fail to give attention and take adequate responsibility for either of those two spaces, our lives are diminished and the relationships that matter in both of those spheres suffer. This is why the Bible continues to remind humans that God has put us in a position of responsibility for God’s creation.

Bioshelter living is meant to be a reminder and a call to ourselves and, perhaps, to others that we live in a whole world of wonder—a world that matters. We must be involved in the world in multiple ways—relationally and even politically—such that we participate in the wellbeing of this wonderful world. Being put in a position of responsibility for creation means acting responsibly.

For me, there is great joy in this, because responsibility only comes where there are real and meaningful relationships. Real and meaningful life is only lived in real and meaningful relationships.

The Message paraphrase of Psalm 8 in the bible is useful in describing this:[1]

¹ God, brilliant Lord, yours is a household name.

² Nursing infants gurgle choruses about you;
toddlers shout the songs
That drown out enemy talk,
and silence atheist babble.

^3-4 I look up at your macro-skies, dark and enormous,
your handmade sky-jewelry,
Moon and stars mounted in their settings.
Then I look at my micro-self and wonder,
Why do you bother with us?
Why take a second look our way?

^5-8 Yet we've so narrowly missed being gods,
bright with Eden's dawn light.
You put us in charge of your handcrafted world,
repeated to us your Genesis-charge,
Made us lords of sheep and cattle,
even animals out in the wild,
Birds flying and fish swimming,
whales singing in the ocean deeps.

⁹ God, brilliant Lord,
your name echoes around the world.

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[1] The Message tries very hard to translate the Psalms back into poetry. This means they are not as accurate as word-for-word translations, but they may be more accurate in conveying the evocative nature of images in the poetry for speaking to our souls.