Addicts of all types who eventually enter recovery know the phrase "window of clarity". Through the haze of drugs or booze, people have a poignant stroke of thought. People realize their addiction is deadly; it is collapsing their personal world. So, too, a cheap energy addict (like me) knows these moments. Every so often, I look at some object in my hand and see the unrecoverable petroleum that actually produced it. I drive 1-94 to see my parents and remember only 130 years ago this journey was harrowing, it took a month by ox cart or more in some seasons. Before that, people walked and working dogs dragged along their portable houses. In that window of clarity my car, all of our cars, which we take for granted, are magic carpets.    

One such moment of clarity occurred this summer in Belcourt, North Dakota, on my home reservation where I went with my mother. I bought an apple in the grocery store. It was labeled Holland. The apple wasn't really from Holland, but it might as well have been. This apple appeared near the central Canadian Border in June -- it came from somewhere very, very far away. There are few places so remote that they do not get shipments of pesticide (petroleum) laced produce, fertilized (petroleum), harvested (petroleum) and shipped (petroleum) from a place equally mysterious and remote. The apple in my hand might as well have been tossed to the Turtle Mountains by a genie -- one created of a fabulously powerful substance accompanied by a deadly curse.

At our last bookstore meeting we talked as a group about what would make our work at Birchbark Books more meaningful. One of us said it would be great to enlarge our mission to include transitional thinking about how to strengthen local economies. The word "transitional" clicked with me. My windows of clarity, interspersed with bouts of magical thinking, included dread. Nobody likes to linger too long in a moment of clarity about climate change because it always ends in dread. Year by year I've tried to recycle, reduce, reuse. Still, the dread. And the word Collapse is enough to stop most thought. But the word Transition somehow pulled me out. Transition is not about dread, survivalist fear, a life of paranoia, hoarding guns and money and vacuum packed plastic barrels of grain. It is about producing our own energy and food, but in a joyous and meaningful way.

My mother's family gardened and canned and hunted all the food they ate only a generation ago, right there in the Turtle Mountains. My mother and father could still survive from their garden and orchard if they had too, even though they give most of what they grow away.

The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience by Rob Hopkins, is a great place to start reading. I recommend it as a positive beginning -- I have worked my way backward into Lester R. Brown's World On The Edge, and John Michael Greer's The Wealth of Nature, and Original Instructions, edited by Melissa K. Nelson, all excellent. As soon as I read The Transition Handbook, however, I realized that in Minneapolis we have the makings of a great transition city. Here are signs:

One year ago our bookstore faced a sheet of asphalt. Kenwood School was paved to the foundation. Last year that asphalt (petroleum) was torn out and replaced with a garden as miraculous as that apple in the Turtle Mountains. It was planted by (genies) the parents of schoolchildren, tended by the children (naturally produced) as well as more (eternal motion machines) parents, teachers, and now is being harvested. At the start of school barbeque, parents took home produce, marveling at the freshness, exchanging recipes. One boy looked at the top of a carrot showing in the dirt and asked, shyly, "can I pull it out?"  He did, and walked away brushing his face dreamily with the soft carrot leaves.  "I never knew they had tops" he murmured.

A moment of clarity for that boy, maybe, and for me a reason to enlarge our bookstore's offerings to include a section on Green Thinking, Urban Homesteading, Climate Change, The Commons, Indigenous Gardening -- all of the topics that I'd love to deny but can't.  If we look over the sides of our magic carpets, we'll realize we're floating on thin air.  If it's all the same, I'd rather coast down or "power down" than drop.  But that requires living in that clarity, more reading, and taking action. 

Thanks to all of our supporters who keep Birchbark Books going here on 21st Street. Watch for Diane Wilson reading from Beloved Child. She not only writes beautifully, but she is the director of Dream of Wild Health, an Indigenous gardening project and an original partner of Birchbark Books.

Louise 

Dear Good Looking Friends,

I've noted it -- everyone who enters Birchbark Books is really good looking.  I don't know why it is, but just a fact.  And particularly when clad in a Birchbark Books organic cotton T-shirt of any vintage everybody is good looking.  That is why we are asking you to send your picture wearing a Birchbark T-shirt to our Facebook page.  We have several editions of our T-shirt now, each one produced for us by that fabled local company, Monkey In a Dryer.  We have the birchbark brown, the robin's egg blue, the erotically charged graphite gray, the current deep Currant, the current Lucky Blue, and I can't remember what else.  If you've got the inclination, please include your favorite book, dog, or tree.   Please tell us where the picture was taken, as long as you were there legally.  Truly, we'd love to meet you wherever you are! 

This is Tree Month -- have you  noticed?  The trees in Minnesota have now fully leafed out and this week just past the solstice they are in such glory it gives a person green brain.  Time to read eaarth, by Bill McKibben to find out what you can do to help your best tree friend.  We cannot exist without trees, and they would certainly do better without us, but they continue to be the most generous living beings on earth.   I'm reading Keepers of the Trees, by Ann Linnea, meeting people who devote themselves to the love of trees.  One of my favorite characters in the book is Merve Wilkinson, who devoted himself to a tree-lot and logged it over the span of fifty years in such a profoundly thoughtful way that there is now more wood in the forest than when he started.  He figured out how to sustain himself, his family, and the forest and has educated people ever since.

We have books on Remarkable Trees, More Remarkable Trees, Tree Houses --  as I'm sitting here writing the late afternoon sun is flowing down through the still, tiny leaves of my favorite locust tree just outside the window.  I know people don't like these trees much because they have big thorns.  Yet their blossoms are swooningly fragrant, they're unkillable, and unfathomably lovely.  But really, isn't every tree helplessly gorgeous, just like the people who come into Birchbark Books?

Book People!  Thanks for your support this summer!  Oh, before I forget, I'd also like to celebrate the Green Team who have made such a beautiful impact on the other side of the street from the bookstore.  Come and see!  People gardening what was once a small wasteland of asphalt -- children learning to grow food -- this is truly inspiring.  Subject of next blog . . . 

I've just sent in the manuscript for the next book in The Birchbark House series.  Title: Chickadee.  I am still working on the art and drawing horses at last because my family (Omakayas, the twins Makoons and Chickadee, Animikiins, and all of the others) have moved onto the Great Plains.  I realized that for the sake of this book series we had to move there around 1866.  This is a fascinating year for all sorts of reasons, but for the main character, Chickadee, it is a year of unusual adventure.   Some odd things happen to Chickadee.  He challenges a man named Skunk.  He is kidnapped by two brutish louts who want a servant.  He learns to cook a wretched concoction called bouyah.  Chickadee runs away from well meaning but heartless missionaries.  He learns to survive completely alone in the woods helped by his namesake, the chickadee, who teaches him a song that can heal.  There is lots more, including a visit to Saint Paul, the first city he has ever seen, and composed at the time of shacks, pubs, treeless mansions, and lots of trading companies.  This book has been on my mind for a long time, and during this endless winter I've finally had time to compose it -- so at last.  As I mentioned, I am still working on the drawings.  I take photographs of my family and use them in the compositions.  I draw objects from my collections.  I make people up.  All in all, this is a pretty good job to have.  I recommend it for those who like to live in their pajamas.