Susan Feathers

Update: go the new blog for the tiny house experience: The House on Belmont St.

I’m pretty tired tonight on the eve of moving from a cozy 900 square foot condo to an old Florida “shotgun” house. It is a small bungalow style, only 13 feet wide, 600 square feet total space, with modest size porches and yard front and back. The owner bought it and moved it to the current site. He elevated it and it is tight as a drum with central air and heat. He believes it was originally built in the 1920s. He kept the orignal windows and screen door, wood ceilings, walls, and floors. In this old style bunglow home there are many large windows that are low to the floors. While it makes it harder to arrange furniture, the light is wonderful. (My condo is very dark.)

The House on Belmont Street is in the Old East Hill District of Pensacola, Florida. The train runs nearby and my friend’s house is behind mine one street above. I can walk or bike into town, and there are several restaurants from southern style bar-b-que to Italian to vegetarian within a few blocks of me. I plan to be on foot or bike much more than using my car, and to become part of a neighborhood and downtown district.

Behind me I leave all the modern conveniences that I have become so used to: dishwasher, stacked washer/drier, garbage disposal, even a microwave. The kitchen is a 1950’s style, with a half-sized electric stove and the most delicious tasting water. Also, I am losing my dining room space, and guest room.

There is a large porcelain tub – the kind you can actually fill and float in – and pale green linoleum in the kitchen, original wood floors in the living room and bedroom, and a porch broad enough to sit with friends on a pleasant night.

While setting up the kitchen this week, I heard so many birds in the oaks, crepe myrtle, and palms around the house. My friends tell me that hawks frequently build their nests and raise young in the tall pines and oaks along the street.

I plan to take permaculture classes to build a garden big enough to grow a significant percent of my weekly fare. I want to learn to care for local citrus which I have in the side yard, and shop at the Palafox Farmer’s Market on Saturday’s. We have a large cooperative grocery downtown as well.

Over the next year I plan to record what I experience, and follow my own withdrawal from so many conveniences. Will I be able to stand it? Should I? There are many older houses that have been remodeled with all the bells and whistles one can desire. I just seized this opportunity because of the location. What will it be like to live in the urban core of a mid-sized city? Grow my food? Walk or bike to meetings and evening events? Will I get in shape? Participate more in civic life and the local cultural scene?

Living in a condo in the suburbs I found stifling after a while. At age 69, I found myself getting all too comfortable. I noticed that most of the residents keep their blinds closed all day and night. Why? Privacy? But, all the light, the trees–life!– is shut out that way.

I will be living on a limited income and need to find smaller places that I can afford. So this is my first venture in that direction. I will create a separate blog site for this year’s experiment. Check back here for the link.! [HERE IT IS]

So…here I go!

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked why I’m spending all this time and energy in worrying about street children half way around the world. For those who haven’t known me very long this might help.

This photo is from a newspaper in Hyderabad India, about one hour drive from our new campus.”

Judge John Kuder wrote to his Facebook followers with his illimitable energy and hope for a better future for children and youths in India. His passion stems from two profound events that occurred with a long stretch of living in between.

The first was the Viet Nam War in which he served from 1970-72.

“Upon completion of law school I began active military service during the height of the Viet Nam war. Although I served my Country well, for which I take great personal pride, I nonetheless became an unwilling observer of the cruelty and human devastation that mercilessly devoured the children of war. Images that I will never forget.”

John returned to Pensacola, his birthplace, to begin a successful law practice. He was elected by his peers to the Circuit Court Bench in 1988, and later elected to Chief Judge of the First Circuit Court of Florida in 1996. While Chief Judge, he was invited in 2000 to participate in an international team of mediators to unravel a political deadlock between the Albanian Supreme Court and that Country’s five political parties.

“While there, however, I was confronted anew with the children of the streets and the unyielding dogs of war that had been quietly stalking my mind over these many years. They were a small society of God’s poorest and least favored, held at bay by the constant interference of forceful but well meaning guards assigned for our personal safety.”

Again, these images percolated in John’s mind and soul, perhaps cultivating the ground in which Judge Kuder and his wife, Susan Bleiler, would begin to dream about making a difference for street children living in poverty, poor health, and abuse. Together they brought The John P. Kuder Children’s Foundation into reality in 2007 – a charity based in Pensacola serving street children in Southeast India.

The National Crime Record Bureau in India reported that 40 million children in India are denied an education and tens of thousands subjected to abuse and sex trafficking.[1]

Looking back on his life thus far, Judge Kuder reflected: “I suppose I have now come full circle from the days of my youth helplessly entangled in the horrors of war to a time when I may yet make an enduring difference in the lives of the least of God’s children. Perhaps this will be my greatest achievement in life.”

To learn more about the work of the Kuder Children’s Foundation go to: http://www.kuderfoundation.org.

[1] The Times of India: “India’s invisible children: Swallowed by the streets.” 10-04-11: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/Indias-invisible-children-Swallowed-by-the-streets/articleshow/10626388.cms

Today I am reminded of so many efforts to bring nonviolent, peaceful forces to bear on social problems that persist in our society. Yesterday I listened to an interview with John Lewis, Civil Rights Leader, Pastor, and humanitarian. It’s well worth listening to. The one phrase, the one central idea gleaned from the interview is this:

“It’s already here…the Beloved Community…it’s already here. Our job is to make it real, today, one step at a time.”

Lewis reminded me that its not about me, us, our time; big social change is coming but it might not be in my lifetime or yours. But the truth is the existence of the Beloved Community is in our present, everyday action. We are bringing it into reality, little bit by little bit. I found this reminder a salve for the wounds of one long in the struggle for the rights of people and also the rights of wildlife and land and water and air. The latter is coming, according to Reverend Lewis. So be it. I can be content with that knowledge.

Seth Godin republished A Letter from a Birmingham Jail this morning for which I am grateful. Its worth a quiet rereading. But here, in short is King’s answer to the question about why he was in Birmingham:

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

UPDATE: See new research from international university scientists about planetary boundaries for safe human operations. We are reaching thresholds for biosphere integrity. (1-18-15)

We are continuously receiving information about the warming of this planet and its oceans, landscapes, and atmosphere. So what’s the big deal?

We are the example of what it means. Human body temperature is normally 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. A few additional degrees higher can threatened our lives and even cause death. How? We are made up of molecular structures, atoms held together by bonds. With increasing internal temperature, atomic bonds lengthen and can even break — denature is the scientific term. Proteins, which are the structures that “run” the functions of our body, basically stop working.

It is the same for every living organism on earth. That’s the big deal. As the oceans absorb more and more heat each year, the smallest creatures are at risk. These are the plankton at the base of food chains in oceans (also lakes). Collapsing food chains happen in “cascades” because every living thing exists in interrelationships. When organisms in that food web die, others die, too, until, like stacked dominoes, the whole system crashes eventually.

Investigate what scientists are reporting with links below and on the side bar of this blog. I like Vitals Signs of the Planet best because it is a snapshot of many indicators scientists are monitoring.

The year 2014 ranks as Earth’s warmest since 1880, according to two separate analyses by NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists.

The 10 warmest years in the instrumental record, with the exception of 1998, have now occurred since 2000. This trend continues a long-term warming of the planet, according to an analysis of surface temperature measurements by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

My parents are remembered by my sisters and family during the season of Advent and the national commemoration of December 7–Pearl Harbor Day. Advent anticipates the coming of Light into the world while Pearl Harbor remembers the dark side of human behavior. These are bookends of the amazing lives of my parents, Edward Buell Feathers and Millicent Adelaide Jones Feathers.

My parents were raised in traditional Southern families, Mom as a Baptist and Dad as a Methodist. They were both rather unsophisticated in their exposure to the world, but Pearl Harbor changed their lives forever. Dad joined the Army Air Corps and proposed to his sweetheart on the same day. Swept from their quiet towns into the cauldron of war, the trajectory of their lives changed dramatically.

Together they brought my sisters, Beverly, Barbie, Kathy and me into this world and tossed us in the backseat of a station wagon. We crisscrossed the U.S. dozens of times over my father’s 22 year career in the Air Force.

But one very special assignment took us to Honolulu, to Hickam Air Force Base. It was 1948 when our family was assigned to Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands. The remnants of war still scarred Wai Nomi Bay. Vivid childhood memories of a long stretch of beach with a lone pink hotel and green palms remains with me. Waikiki Beach held only one hotel, the Royal Hawaiian.

The islands were a wonder to my parents, especially my mother. She learned hula from a Hawaiian teacher, we know only as Mama Bishop. In 1949 Mom graduated from The Bishop School of Traditional Hula and would perform for years afterward. Below she is performing a traditional dance at Selfridge AFB in Detroit, a cold reality after the sunny, gentle island life she loved and yearned for ever after.

Photos of Mom and Dad going out on the town in their silk shirts and dresses–splashed with native flowers in lavender, white, or ruby red–and always the blossom in Mom’s hair, show their happy young faces.  They were very much in love. I was in awe of them at age 4. Yet this is just a slice of their lives. I prefer to remember when they were happy, young, in love with life, and dreaming of the future.

In 2012 on Pearl Harbor Day Dad joined his Sweet Leilani on some distant shore transforming darkness into light. He was 95, still tripping the light fantastic.

So today we symbolically throw an aromatic lei onto the green Gulf waters and hope it might return to those lovely beaches on a deep blue sea. How we miss our parents, Talking Bear and Sweet Leilani.

“Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”  ― Aldo Leopold

 

Approval of the Keystone Pipeline masquerades as a political or an environmental debate. It is actually a discussion about the trajectory of American society. And, much depends on it.

It is also an old debate first aired in early American history about the kind of economy best suited for a democracy. We chose a free market, unfettered by government. That suited people who remembered first-hand how government can oppress individual freedom. After centuries of church and state oppression in Europe, early Americans thrived on the open space and endless abundance of natural wealth the North American continent offered newcomers.

The vastness of the continent and the virginal state of forests, grasslands, soils, and lakes and rivers must have been something fantastic which we 21^st century Americans find hard to imagine today.

Our generation faces something entirely new. While the signs of stress in the body of the continent have been visible and studied for nearly 100 years, the day to day economic activities of our nation have not responded to new conditions. The productivity of soils is falling; resistance to pesticides is growing. Species populations are plummeting, fisheries shrinking, and climate is changing with burning of fossils fuels.

Regulations have been imposed, and grown in complexity, that restrict our freedom to use the land as we wish—for our pursuit of happiness. While ecosystem science has established the limits of natural systems, we have not established a true understanding of how that relates to us.

We do not accept limits on our individual freedoms. We believe we can live outside of natural laws—a chosen people whom God has put in charge of Nature. That is an outdated story that, like our early American history, no longer is true in modern circumstances. To act on that original story is perilous today.

Debate over the completion of the Keystone Pipeline is really this: we either accept that there are limits to what we can extract from the land under our feet, or not.

Which way this will go in 2015 is not about cheap energy, nor is it about jobs. At its core it is about how we chose to relate to the Earth, how we steward the remaining resilience of natural communities for generations to come. It is about looking honestly at the human condition—we are utterly dependent on all the species and physical elements that created The Garden our forefathers found when they first stepped upon these shores.

This period of time in human history is one in which we understand a lot about how ecosystems work. We see innovative solutions to clean energy production, pollution, food production and building life-sustaining cities all across the world but as a nation we have not yet embraced the underlying truth of our dependence on earth’s healthy functioning.

Don’t be fooled by the debates in Washington, and in the news: this is about a fundamental shift in how we relate to the land under our feet and to each other.

The work of our citizenry is perhaps the most critical since the founding of the democracy itself. At that time we asked, “What kind of country do we want to live in?” Now we must ask, “What kind of world do we want to live in?”

In the 21^st Century, our democratic way of life must incorporate science into its way of knowing, and reexamine how we treat each other as well as other forms of life in the free market system that drives all we do.

The Keystone Pipeline is a debate we should welcome and in which we must all participate because so much depends on it. We are truly at a moral crossroads. Which way we decide to turn determines the fates of current and future generations of all living communities across the earth.

This is not about a pipeline. It is not about oil. This is about who we are.

Today I am remembering my father who served in the U.S. Air Force as a bomber pilot. His B-29, The Three Feathers, has been restored and can be seen on the March Air Field Museum’s website. Watch the running banner for the B-29, Z-49–that is the plane dad and his crew of young men flew in WWII, Pacific Theater.

Here they are flying over Japan on a bombing raid. Our family has listened to the tales of fear and hardship our fathers endured until they have become legends.

Yet, there are other legends that we do not hear as much, legends that arise years after our heroes return from the battlefield.

Dad passed away on December 7, 2012 a fitting day for him because it was a day that would define the rest of his life. It took him from the small town of Watauga where he’d grown up into a vast system of power and excitement, taught him to fly complex machines, led him to bomb cities where no doubt many people suffered as we defended our own shores.

Dad, like the men and women of today, was swept into events larger than any he could imagine or had the experience to understand at the time. He eagerly joined the Army Air Corps for the personal reasons people do today: to learn to fly, to leave the poverty of his early life, and to gain the benefits provided by the best military in the world.

His service in the WWII was dangerous and like so many others, he and his crew came within inches of losing their lives. Crew members were injured but Dad brought them all home. He was older than all of them: 24. The others were 18 to 21 years old. At one point when they were flying only a few hundred feet above the waves of the Pacific, on only one engine, their lives passed before them–such brief lives. Dad recalled being filled with anger. “I thought, ‘What a terrible waste, to lose these good young men. And, for what?'” It was just like him to not even consider his own life as similarly worthy.

Much later, in his 90s, recurring dreams in which he smelled burning flesh, often woke him at night. These were recollections of the low level bombing runs made over Tokyo. They were effective in shocking the Japanese but they took untold civilian lives. Dad would query, “Will I go to hell for killing them?”

These are the moral conflicts that war imposes on the best young men and women while the rest of us read our newspapers, raise kids, and dance the night away. While we plan our day, stealth bombers kill innocent bystanders as we zero in on suspected terrorists. Are we truly engaged? No. Our volunteer military has unwittingly released the American public from the great toll we place on our young men and women. And when they return, do we truly care for them? We have the highest suicide rate among returning veterans than at anytime in our history. (See link below.)

I do not want to rain on the many parades that will happen today, but I do want to reflect on these issues because they disturb me. We fought WWI to end all wars, and WWII to defeat evil in the world. And so on…but war creates war…it never settles anything for long.

As a measure of our conscience, shouldn’t we rethink how we respond to violence? As a country that was originally founded among many spiritual communities, we have somehow walled off the military actions of our nation as exempt from moral scrutiny. That is convenient, isn’t it? I would savor a discussion about this incongruity even while I pay homage to the veterans who served and are serving our country today.

I’ll stand with all my fellow Americans today to honor our men and women in uniform even while I put out this call to reexamine what we have created and where it may lead us.

About Returning Veterans Today.

For a morally responsible perspective: Joanna Macy: Our greatest danger, on Strongheart’s blog.

Below is a portrait of my father’s crew. He is on the far right, back row.

The midterm elections are over. Savor the silence. There is a good deal of analysis but its nothing like the barrage of emails that filled my inbox from the Dems who grew desperate and asked me for money at least a dozen times a day. I voted of course and gave what I could but they never let up because no one relates to us “people” as individuals anymore. We are part of a fundraising formula.

I will not go on. There is this breather of sorts–a time in between–the past elections and the coming Presidential campaigns. I plan to head for the hills or hoist the mainsail and take off close-hauled to the wind.

As we end 2014 I am party-less and encouraged that people can duck under the rhetoric of these times to chart a brand new day.

I feel a new democracy forming that is people-centered, made of clear thinking people at the base of the American food chain, who are not going to settle for wholesale theft of the American Dream by a few corporate heavy weights.

All we need now is a candidate who can embody that spirit.