Salt from the Earth

A Way with Water

by Laura Parker Roerden
I have always thought rocks
uncommonly beautiful,
none the less
when I notice one along the river move:

a long neck
gracefully emerging
from the mottled

grey mound

now pointing towards the river.

It’s only in the refection
in the water that I realize
that what I have before me
is a Great Blue Heron.

No doubt he had seen me

long before I saw him.

Now standing
assuredly
on
one leg;

the heron seems to have

no need for the symmetry
on which we depend. He is stock-still

and completely ignoring me,

as if to underline my irrelevance
to this watery place.

I have come to the riverbank
craving inspiration,
but I feel completely inadequate

watching this master of

motionless patience, who is neither
too assured of his next meal
nor fully sated. He stands

in a space
that seems
to define
the narrow
middle
of peace,

assured a fish
will always rise

and offer itself in a
play of shadow and light capturing
imagination and intuition.

How does
he know
that the long spiny
bones swallowed whole,

once exposed will not harm him,

but rather nourish, as stomach acids
make edges supple?

I will not be present when he later
spits out the undigested
parts of feathers or skull,

now smooth on the forest floor

reflecting bits of moonlight
offering itself to others
as source.

The heron will not look at me;

I offer nothing
to him. So I take
what I have come to find

and leave the river
and its bend behind, thumbing
the silent stone

I have picked up that now weighs
like a promise in my pocket.

Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) and Earth, Ltd.

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The Space Between Here and There

by Laura Parker Roerden

The reeds are awakening
in a dawn of haloed light.

Morning has risen
and is lined by low tide
at the edge of the marsh,

where gulls

are already signaling
I am late;

late to the riotous exposure
of mussels and clams and polychaete worms;

late to the stars

that have somehow
squeezed as if through a curtain
and are unfurling in symmetry

and colors
impossible to name.
For just at the moment I understand a hue,

it is gone, lost forever.

The wheel is always turning at this edge of this sea.
Sand is now exposed as sheen in the low light

reflecting gathering clouds.

A herring gull dives toward the sand like an acrobat,
but at the very last
minute, veers skyward

with a green crab in her beak. The crab is no more,

or less than the gull;
the sand and sky holds the moment
as if in a light box.

At the edge of the marsh
water flirts with light
where a piebald brown bird

drags behind a broken wing
like too much baggage. This bird

is scavenging the contents
of a small styrofoam container.

The other gulls gather
and crowd the injured bird out, flying away
with some fries and pieces of bun.

I pick up the container and notice
pieces of styrofoam are missing
where beaks have left

behind tiny
pockmarks.

But the bird is preening
beneath his wings and tail,
as if nothing has happened;

the tide now covering
everything left behind
in a sleight of hand.

The gulls have moved on
and are patrolling above where the

surf breaks. The sun now a flat disk
in a suddenly featureless sky.

It’s as if a dream has rolled in,
where things exposed

are now hidden and those unknown now seen.

I half expect to see the broken bird fly aloft
on gunmetal waves of power and momentum.

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Pelagic Water

by Laura Parker Roerden

Go to open ocean, I heard,
as I had spent too much time struggling

on the edges in the surf.
There is only one way to climb

out of the grave of a riptide;
all lifeguards know this.

You must swim parallel in deeper water.
You must give up the safety of heading for shore.

Pelagic water is where you’ll find
your agency. Where the bottom that drops out

beneath you is a relief from striving.
In open water, you no longer orient

to the rocks or sand or sky. You must begin
a long dive within to mark your spot on any chart.

You must give up the idea of destinations and float on your back
to calm a fraught heart, even as you imagine

what lurks beneath might be something bent on harm.
As you breathe, each draw is a deep pull down

to the wave trough of awareness.
This is all.  You will find an inner landscape has just as many

reference points as land. Only now you will navigate
by memory, by sensation, naming feelings as if

plotting pushpins, with paper giving way with ease.
Yes, this pelagic water is where you’ll find fragments

do not fall like shards of glass or dried flowers
or dust; but instead flutter and fold as one,

revealing shade as merely depth or night
and shape as the other side of dawn.

About the Pelagic Zone
The pelagic zone is the part of the open sea or ocean comprising the water column, i.e., all of the sea other than that near the coast or the sea floor. The name is derived from the Greek πέλαγος (pélagos), which might be roughly translated as “sea” but is more accurately translated as “open sea.”

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The Right Whale

by Laura Parker Roerden

I’ve heard tales of how they once came
close to Cape Cod by the hundreds,
a thick layer of blubber enough to insulate
for cold, yet insufficient against spears.

When dead, they bobbed on the surface
like a cork. Or started to decompose as gases
expanded flesh like a bloated Macy’s
Thanksgiving Parade balloon.

Easy to tie to a hull, methodical sectioning
took place, as furnaces rendered blubber
into oil and smoke snaked from chimneys
as from a pyre, as fog, as stain.

Wives lit lamps with that oil waiting
for husbands, now heroes, to return from
faraway waters with more, until there was none.
Too slow, too buoyant, too close to land,

too numerous: they were the right whales
to kill. Now our children cling to rails
on diesel powered boats on Stellwagen,
simply to get a glimpse. A whale surfaces

to a choir of audible wonderment, followed by
stunned hush. Worthy enough to be named,
naturalists tell us this one whale’s story,
a history with details erased. There is

so much we will not know. Still, we pivot
to look closer; there are too few to take
for granted. They are now the right whales
to tell us about our hearts, about the depths

to which imagination can raise hope
like silt and mix layers of paint
on a palette in new combinations;
a rainbow after a storm. They are the right

whale to remind us: we have been here before.
Though billowy smoke spills behind us,
a calling card of folly, we also hold
science and art and will in our hands.

They are the right whale to teach us how we
entangle ourselves in nooses or in the refuse
of our inabilty to work together. But that we can be
also be struck by potentials to do it differently.

This time—this very pregnant now
in which we are—when the whales have stopped calving,
perhaps they are asking to simply be seen
as the right whale to save.

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About the Right Whale
The North Atlantic Right Whale is the most endangered large whale, with an estimated population of 400. In 2018 there was an unusual mortality event with record numbers found dead from entanglements and ship strikes and a year without calving. Whereas groups of North Atlantic right whales once numbered in the hundreds in feeding grounds, nowadays they usually travel alone or in groups of 2-3 (sometimes up to about 12). In 2019, we are happy to report that 6 new calves have been spotted. For more information on the right whale and threats to its survival see the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life of the New England Aquarium.

Try Chicken Keeping. . . But Put Away the Blankets and Towels

by Laura Parker Roerden

Best Investments in Sustainability

Many of us have seen movies like Food, Inc or others and learned horror stories about the antibiotic and hormone laden poulty coming out factory farms. Yet buying chicken and pastured-eggs at Whole Foods can be quite expensive. If you care about your food and where it comes from, consider raising your own–even if you only have a small backyard in which to do it. Not only will you be able to benefit of controlling how your food is raised, you’ll be embarking on one of the greatest adventures of your lifetime.

Even though our fifth generation farm was once a poultry farm, I did not come to chicken keeping easily. A famous story in our family is of the littlest grandchild (ME) collecting eggs in our double-decker chicken barn. My father always laughed whenever he told the story of me chucking eggs from a distance into the wire frame basket, breaking a couple dozen eggs in a few particularly hard flung tosses. But I recall him being pretty angry at the time. I myself think I just had a brilliant sense for conserving energy when farming, or perhaps an even better sense for how to get out of farm duties.

My nephew and our fifth-generation farmer Ed was the one who reintroduced chickens to our farm. At the outset we purchased twenty-five Rhode Island Red chicks from our local feed store because it was the breed my grandparents had kept. Rhode Island Reds are good layers and bred for the long New England winters.

grandfatherinfield — My grandfather free-ranging his Rhode Island Reds (RIR) and Leghorns. He preferred the RIRs, which lay brown eggs, but kept the Leghorns because some of his customers insisted on white eggs.

The first year, we kept our young chickens inside our farm’s big red barn with a small concrete-based chicken wire enclosure to qualify as outdoor space. Despite the fact that our farm had once supplied eggs and poultry to the entire Blackstone Valley, we were hopeless novices.

I remember that first fall noticing that a lone hen had gotten out and was roaming my vegetable garden. I panicked. I could imagine hawks circling and was pretty sure that with dusk setting in our young chicken would not make it through the night. (I had watched enough Looney Tunes cartoons as a child to know the dangers.)

I enlisted our babysitter and children to help. There was utter pandemonium as all five of us ran around our yard and hayfields with towels and sheets, flinging them at the terrified bird as she ran for cover under brush.

It was almost dark when I announced that we were giving up. The hen could not be caught. We all went back in to the farmhouse where I poured myself a glass of red wine and pondered the fox or hawk that would soon also be having dinner. I was sautéing onions when I glanced out the kitchen window to see the escapee Rhode Island Red casually cross the street to the red barn. She was putting herself back in for the night.

I laughed out load. In that moment I learned that it’s true: chickens do actually literally come home to roost. From then on we allowed our chickens to roam our pastures and yard freely, knowing that they would always come back at dark.

But I had also learned an even more important lesson:

You can take expensive chicken keeping workshops and order fancy chicken coops online. But the best way to learn about chickens is by keeping them.

So if you have been thinking about having some backyard chickens, just do it!

Here are some very simple guidelines I can offer:

Build your own coop Chicken coops need not be expensive; they simply need to provide shelter from the elements and a place to roost and lay eggs. So build your own. Here are some inspired ideas for upcycling and to get your creativity flowing.

Buy Sexlinks or have a plan for re-homing roosters You can buy baby chicks through your local feed store such as Tractor Supply or online in the spring. You will receive the chicks when they are only a day old, which means that your supplier will be sorting the chickens by sex when they first born. Even though you can order all females; it’s likely that your supplier will make some mistakes and you will receive at least one or two roosters with your run. Many towns have ordinances that forbid roosters because they might be considered a nuisance to your neighbors, so consider ordering Sexlinks (a breed of chickens in which females and males are entirely different colors, thereby virtually guaranteeing females) and as a backup have a plan on how to re-home your roosters. Or if you can keep roosters in your community, consider doing so! There are many benefits to having a few roos in your flock.

Free-range or provide an enclosed yard with both dirt and grass access Pasture-raised eggs are so much healthier for us, because of the diet the chickens are eating outdoors. You’ll want to provide your hens with a habitat that has worms, insects, and sufficient dirt for the birds to take “dirt baths”— an important part of their hygiene. For a complete discussion on the benefits of pasture-raised eggs, see Pass the Pastured-Eggs, Please.

If you sell your eggs, sell them at competitive prices THIS might be the most important advice I can offer. Chance are if you’re thinking about keeping backyard chickens, you’re a friend of the local-vore movement. So don’t undercut professional farmers in your area by offering your eggs at a lower price just because you “only need to cover your expenses.” You’ll be doing more harm than good by out competing the local food providers, who are likely struggling to keep in the game.

And lastly: Put away the blankets and towels. Your chickens will thank you for it.

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A Love Letter to Baking Soda

by Mary McDonald

Best Investments in Sustainability

My first encounters with baking soda happened, of course, in my mother’s kitchen. Whenever my mother was getting ready to bake, it was my job to help her gather all of the ingredients. Cinnamon, cloves, sugar, vanilla, baking powder,baking soda. I had no idea what baking soda did, or why it was different from baking powder. I was kind of fascinated with both. The baking powder was almost silvery-white, fluffy, with that nifty top that helped you level your measuring spoon.

Baking soda by contrast, was its gritty, rough and tough cousin. The box had a picture of a huge, muscled arm about to swing a hammer, a strange visual for something that was necessary for baking banana bread. You would think a baking ingredient would have a picture of a cake, or an apron, or a spoon. But, no, there it was, a defiantly masculine visage nestled among all things floury and sweet and spicy.

It looks like the folks at Arm and Hammer knew a few things about their product that I didn’t back then. Far more than a leavening agent for baking, baking soda or natron, its pure mineral form, has been used for thousands of years. Back in ancient Egypt it was used as a cleaner and as part of the mummification process.

The baking soda we are familiar with today came into use in the 1840’s. In modern times, baking soda was used to clean 100 years of grime off the Statue of Liberty. Baking soda has also been used to aid environmental clean-up efforts. People have used to it to decontaminate soil, neutralize the effects of acid rain in lakes, and decrease air pollution in factory smokestacks. How’s that for muscle?

One the home front, baking soda is a non-toxic, inexpensive alternative to a host of cleaning and personal care products. Leslie Reichert, says in her book, The Joy of Green Cleaning, that baking soda was one of only four products her great-grandmother used to clean. It plays a starring role in many of her non-toxic cleaning recipes. Dirty oven? No need for toxic, aerosol cleaners- baking soda and vinegar do the trick. Carpet needs refreshing? A little sprinkle of baking soda before vacuuming neutralizes odors.

Lest you mistake me for something I am NOT, let me assure you, I hate cleaning and domestic chores in general. Nobody will ever mistake me for a domestic goddess. Cooking, cleaning, gardening-I am half-assed at best. The idea of green living lights my fire, though, so I am pretty revved about baking soda as something that helps us live greener, cheaper and more simply.

Again, Pioneer Woman I am not. I can make homemade cleaning recipes, but only if they are super simple. More than three ingredients and you’ve lost me. If I can make these kind of changes, anyone can do it! I have replaced shelves full of toxic cleaners with a few, large boxes of baking soda.

My go-to baking soda cleaner recipe is:

Baking soda
A few drops of essential oil (anything you love)

Remember I said no more than three ingredients? A lot of people recommend tea tree oil, because it helps with mildew and mold. I use orange essential oil because the scent seems to be have energizing, uplifting effect.

Here are some ways I use this mixture on a regular basis (Ooh, wait! Is that a latent Hestia, goddess of the hearth, emerging? Nah. More like Artemis. I just want to save the wild forests!)

Cleaning

Stainless steel sinks

Stainless steel sinks seem to cling to smells and scrubbing with baking soda gets them clean, clean, clean! I spray hydrogen peroxide afterwards and let it sit for a few minutes to kill germs. Voila! Even a half-assed cleaning slacker can do this.

Drains

For some reason, the sink in one of our bathrooms periodically gives off a God-awful stink when we run the water. It’s disgusting. I have to take the stopper out and scrub the drain with a bottle brush. You don’t want a visual on this, trust me! It doesn’t stay clean long. I hate this chore, but I resigned myself to getting it done when it’s needed. Recently, I tried the baking soda-orange oil mixture. I poured it down the drains and let it sit for several hours. I can’t believe it, but it’s been weeks and that gross smell hasn’t come back.

Bathrooms

Weirdly, I get kind of a kick out of the fact that I can take a shower and then clean afterwards it with my baking soda mix and not worry that bleach or some other neurotoxins are seeping into my skin. Or, that I could scrub the tub with baking soda, run a bath in my newly cleaned tub, and even add a little baking soda to the water, which can be good for a lot of skin and gynecological issues. (Note that there are several reasons NOT to put baking soda in the tub, like being pregnant or having diabetes, so definitely check with your doctor.) I am gearing up to teach my kids how to clean the bathroom this way. Never in a million years would I have them clean with conventional cleaners and 1) breathe in the fumes or 2) expose their skin to the chemicals. With baking soda, I wouldn’t worry. They’ll probably think it’s fun-win-win!

Laundry

Depending on the type of washing machine you have, you can use baking soda to add a boost to your laundry cleaner. In my old washing machine, I put it right in the washing tub. With a newer model, I add it to the bleach compartment. Baking soda is especially good for getting towels smelling fresh. (You know, because nobody picks up their wet, crumpled towels from the floor.)

Personal Care Uses

Brushing your teeth

If you look at the ingredients, you’ll find that baking soda is in a lot of commercial toothpastes because it’s effective at removing plaque and germs. You can save a lot of money by making up your own paste, or going the slacker route and tapping a fingerful of baking soda on your toothbrush and thinning it with a little water.

Skin care

As mentioned above, you can use baking soda in the bath to help with certain conditions. It makes your skin really feel clean and silky. It can be used as a face cleaner or even a blackhead remover. This stuff is unreal!

Washing your hair

In a pinch, you can even mix baking soda with a little water and wash your hair with it. There are those who say washing your hair with baking soda regularly isn’t a good idea (and others who swear by it), that it can strip it too much of the natural oils. I’m not willing to take risks with my hair and do it long term, but the few times I have done it, my hair has felt spectacularly clean. Like I said, in a pinch.

How About You?

The list of possible uses for baking soda goes on and on. Cleaning car batteries, freshening up stinky shoes, insect repellent, ……. you name it. What will you use it for?

Mary McDonald is a writer and educator living in Central Massachusetts. You can find her at linkedin/marymcdonald or Good Green News.

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Fire and Ice

By Laura Parker Roerden

I hate spring. It feels freeing to admit that. When you live in a cold clime, there is too much social pressure to triumph spring’s return as if it were the 2^nd coming of Jesus Himself, sliding in on a gaudy skateboard wearing a magnolia wreath and tossing chocolate coins to all the good children.

My mother died in the spring. The next day the forsythia along our garage exploded into riotous golden bloom. My father also died in the spring. The greening of the pasture that year heralded the beginning of a battle against weeds; there were no cows to graze it.

Then my brother died a few springs later, four days after the anniversary of our mother’s death. Huge flocks of geese landed that year in the hayfield destroying any chance of second-cut hay. My brother was not there to chase them away. That’s just as well.

By the time my nephew had repaired all of the haying equipment by himself it was nearly fall. He set out with his brother and a few friends and hayed the slanted field for the first time without his father as the light slid low on the horizon, which matched our moods at the time.

Today is the first day of spring. To mark it, I walked the river with a dear friend I’ve known since grade school. The blazing sun projected skeletal shadows from the trees on the white canvas of snow-cover and still partially frozen ice, giving everything an exaggerated architectural feel that nearly propped me up as we walk.

Busy chatting, we stop when we notice two wood peckers drilling holes for their nests in a call and response pattern that felt less like a territorial move and more like an attempt to erase loneliness. If not for the warmth of the sun, which lit the remaining dried grass peaking above the snow across the meadows as if it was on fire, there would be no sign that it was, in fact, now officially spring.

I’ve always assumed I hated spring because of the losses I have experienced during it. But today something different is afoot. I am comforted by the fire from above and the ice below, as if holding these two extremes is easier than swinging into a field of riotous blooms when your heart is still shattered. It’s not a flip of a switch, or turn on the earth’s axis, that allows us to get to spring, but the long march of winter itself.

It has taken me more than a half century to get it. You cannot have Easter without surrendering to the long march of death that is Lent. If you wait until Thursday, when Christ is betrayed, to prepare for Sunday, when He rises, you won’t get there in time. I know that for a fact. The razor’s edge between the dark and light can be skated, but only within the larger cavern created by tending our broken hearts.

A friend just posted that her mother has had an additional 16 years since today’s anniversary of a stem cell replacement that saved her life. I read this as I grapple with the 15-year anniversary of my mother’s loss of her own battle with cancer.

I do not shrug the coincidence of these two events off. I have at times been sanguine about those years without my mom; but I’ve also been jealous of the time my friends have had with their mothers that I have not. For today, I will settle into the gap and hold my friend’s celebration with joy while also holding my loss with pain and welcome the advent of spring in a field of snow.

Surrendering does not always mean we come up empty handed. Sometimes it means we simply hold two extremes.

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Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) and Earth, Ltd. and is a member of the Pleiades Network of Women.

The Quest

by Laura Parker Roerden

Photo © Brian Skerry. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

You can find just about anything you could dream
in an ocean. Tiny horses holding on by prehensile tails
to flat vines that float upwards and shimmer in sunlight like cities.

Red squid that fly with vampire wings and shoot out light orbs
to stun predator or prey. A flat ray with a saw. It won’t surprise you
at all then to learn of a swimming unicorn whale: the narwhal.

Swords drawn, several narwhales move as one. It’s impossible
to know what they seek, but something in their quickening suggests
a quest, as strips of Arctic ice fall away around them like sunburnt

skin shedding. They move in now open ocean. There’s no place
to hide from killer whales; no escape from our hand. If we follow them
we’d see: that everywhere we suffer from wounds that need healing.

The Fisher King himself, we are told, guards a holy grail
in a vast wasteland of destruction; where seas now rise. Is it any wonder why
the narwhals are headed there? Or perhaps they have already arrived?

And what will they discover once their journey is complete? Are they trying
to show us that we should come too? For surely their quest is our own:
for a home where towers of ice do not tumble down around us;

where we heed a wild call for full hearts and heroes to wake.

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About the Photo by Brian Skerry
Sea ice and ice floe edge around Navy Board Inlet, Baffin Island in the high arctic of Canada. At this time of year (June) the ice begins to break up and wildlife become more plentiful with animals such as seals, narwhals, bowhead whales and polar bears feeding in the rich waters. Climate change is having an effect on this region, with ice melting earlier during many recent years. (Pristine Seas expedition team working/filming documentary)

An Un-Poem About the Falling Snow

by Laura Parker Roerden

1. I woke up this morning with the phrase, “something uplifting” in my mind, then saw that among the snowfall out my window many snowflakes were rising up on unseen currents.

2. I’m sure a mathematician could help us understand the exact preponderance that falls at a predictable speed to their place on the ground.

3. And a scientist, God bless, could scan our brains to see the landscape of light that begins the chain of chemical reactions that soothes our fraught hearts.

4. If the scientist and mathematician were together drinking wine they might tumble upon fractal geometry rooted in our genetic evolution to explain this, and in days of computation arrive at formulas and the universal concepts of negative and infinite variables that hold the ideas together like gravity.

5. In all of their graceful complexity, they would simply be explaining our heart’s shape is rooted at core to the natural world.

6. That if everything expands and can be plotted on bells, the only thing keeping us from flying apart on rising and falling currents is this singular fact shrouded as mystery.

7. That even simple snow when it falls is able to call us home.

(Inspired by dinner with a scientist, mathematician, musician and writer.)

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Pass the Pastured-Eggs, Please!

Best Investments in Sustainability

by Laura Parker Roerden

What kind of eggs should you buy? Most of us make the decision standing in the grocery aisle, the refrigerator door open scanning cartons with claims like “cage-free,” “organic,” “antibiotic free” and the ever-confusing “natural,” while we mentally calculate how much more we are spending for the eggs that sound healthier and more humane and asking ourselves: is it really worth it?

While a complete discussion of the real meaning behind these labels is helpful to every consumer, I’d like to make the case for pasture-raised eggs. Pasture-raised eggs are those lain by chickens that are given free-range access to actual pastures. Some are driven around in what are called “chicken-tractors,” which conjures up images of hilarious antics. But a chicken tractor is really just a wagon that can hold many chickens at a time for flexible transport and shelter. Hens transported by chicken tractors are allowed to roam an area of grassland that is rotated, assuring that high volumes of hens do not ruin the area. The chickens get what they need in terms nutrition, but they also leave their droppings as a natural fertilizer before moving on to greener, and (now rotated) pastures.

Hens that are raised on healthy grassland in the fresh air and sunshine have all of the benefits of eating as nature intended birds to eat: they have free choice access to worms, insects, seeds. These nutrients the hen eats end up concentrated in the egg itself. You could say that the birds are transferring healthy nutrients from the soil and mother earth directly to you through their eggs.

Pastured-eggs are EGG-cellent.Their large dark orange yolks even LOOK healthier, because they are. Their color, flavor and texture are made distinctive by high amounts of Vitamin A, D, E, K2, B-12, folate, riboflavin, zinc, calcium, beta carotene, choline, and tons of omega 3 fatty acids, including DHA, EPA, ALA, and AA. A pasture-raised egg is a true superfood.

Scientists are increasingly looking at open grassland/pastureland as one of the many promising solutions to global warming. Effectively managed agricultural grassland takes carbon out of the atmosphere and puts it back in the ground. Why not give farmers a boost whose efforts to raise animals on pasture are often the only thing keeping land that takes carbon out of the atmosphere from being developed?

Your search for the best possible egg might even bring you to join a CSA or develop a relationship with a local farm, where you can be reconnected to the rhythms of light and nature that have sustained our bodies and psyches for millennia.

Waiting for first eggs can feel like waiting for a pot to boil. The days shorten, the shadows lengthen. Just as darkness descends, the eggs arrive in a blast of nature’s promise of spring.

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Cleaning

Stainless steel sinks

Drains

Bathrooms

Laundry

Personal Care Uses

Brushing your teeth

Skin care

Washing your hair

How About You?

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