No Impact Week: Pants Update

jeans on a porch

My consumption dream for the week came true, and then some. I had offers of jeans and coupons toward the purchase of a new pair from several people. I took the first person to offer a pair up on her offer – When I showed up on her porch (and I carpooled to get there, I’ll have you know), I found 2 pairs of jeans and 1 pair of cords. I’m set for pants for the next 2 years, at least! And my friend came running out to give me the piece of salmon we ate last night. The salmon that I ate last night while wearing my new pants.

All of the offers I received have inspired me to create a clothing potluck. If you’re interested in joining me to share clothes, shoes, and any accessories, please watch the Bainbridge Barter site for more information soon.

I’m thinking something a bit less overwhelming than the clothing swaps that involve a big pile on the floor, something a bit more organized where we each bring whatever we’ve got on hand and organize it quickly by size/type. There’ will be no need to sort through every drawer or dresser in your home; we’ll meet often enough to make that unneccessary. If we meet at the change of each season, we can give away items clothes from the season just past and the one to come, things we know we won’t wear again. Whatever doesn’t find a new home will be donated to Helpline or ARC of Kitsap County.

If we all pare down what we have and find things we love enough to wear them out, we’ll be lowering our impact in good ways while we look good.

No Impact Week: Energy

Let me say this: It is a whole lot easier to reduce our energy use in September than it was during our first No Impact Week in January. Dawn came and brought us light in time for breakfast and our walk to the school bus stop. If we’d eaten dinner on time, there would have been enough dusky light for that meal, too. But we spent so long picking strawberries in my parents’ garden, we ate late by the light of our vegetable wax tea light candles.

One of these girls just ate salmon for the first time.

Our candlelight dinner brought us a major breakthrough. One of my children is rather difficult to feed. We’ve made incredible progress, and she has a diet of over 45 foods now, where there used to be about 10 (and that’s counting ketchup and balsamic vinegar as foods). She is so sensitive to visual input, the mere sight of some foods sets off her gag reflex, and then she feels too queasy to eat anything at all.

Last night I cooked up a beautiful piece of salmon my friend’s son caught. It was a gorgeous pink steak that I dusted with rapadura, cumin, and cinnamon. I steamed up a pile of green beans from our shared garden plot, then glazed them with with lemon juice and Bragg’s amino acids. We had a pot of steamed Californian rice to cushion everything. I figured Mira and I would enjoy the salmon while Ava ate beans and rice. In the semi-dark of our table, it was hard to see exactly what was on our plates, and Ava ended up trying a bite of her salmon…And she loved it. She ate the whole piece I had put there because that’s our rule; it goes on her plate, even if she doesn’t want it there.

Thank you, No Impact Week for bringing us a very unexpected change. Who knows what other gifts moving to a lower impact life will bring us? I’m in it for the journey and the illumination about how all of our tangled threads are woven together into this messy beautiful life.

No Impact Week: Food

If only it were simple to eat well. Because I can’t afford to buy all the organic produce I want for my family, and because it’s usually all wrapped up in plastic, we forage and grow and barter to fill our bellies with seasonal vegetables and fruit. By eating seasonally, we keep the costs low – It’s always less expensive to eat what’s abundant, and it tastes much better. We have 6 hens in our back yard who supplement their layer mash with the insects and plants they scratch up and our non-spoiled leftovers (although they despise carrots and celery, they’ll eat almost everything else).

first egg!

We get our meat from a family that runs cattle on native forage along the Columbia River; we buy 1/4 steer from them, and they deliver to the entire island in one frozen truck load the night before our local Harvest Fair each year. For about the same price as the beef at our local grocery store (true, our local supermarket is more expensive than those off-island), we get grass-fed beef cut-to-order from cattle that have never spent a minute in a finishing lot or slaughterhouse. I save up each year to make this lump sum purchase, and store our beef in a chest freezer I got via Freecycle. I’ve read conflicting reports on the relative carbon footprints of conventional and grass-fed beef; some say grass-fed is worse, some say it isn’t. Without a doubt, a completely local vegetarian diet has the smallest footprint of all, but we are omnivores, heavy on the veg with a bit of meat.

our shared community garden plot

We share a community garden plot with Liesl and family, our Pioneering the Simple Life friends, so we can grow things that just don’t do well in our own home garden plots. Right now we have 3 kinds of beans, 2 kinds of summer squash, chysanthemum greens, walking onions, and rapini ready to harvest, and beets, carrots, and more rapini coming along for later this fall/winter. Sharing a garden plot is wonderful – We share the watering on hot days, cover for each other when someone is out of town, and it’s just more fun.

Mira with foraged Bittercress

This spring, inspired by people like Ava Chin, the Urban Forager of the New York Times and Landgon Cook of Fat of the Land, we set out to see if we could go a month without buying produce or anything else from a grocery store. It worked! We were so busy foraging for greens in our local ditches, marshes and yards, we forgot to plant our early summer garden. We ate nettles, various cresses, and dandelions for months. My girls loved it, and ate more greens than ever before – It’s much more fun to run the edges of a wetland picking cress than it is to follow a shopping cart around, and when you’ve found it on your own, it’s a treasure you can’t wait to taste.

turnips

But then the flush of early greens was over, and our shared garden plot was empty except for a bumper crop of beautiful purple top turnips with amazing greens. Liesl and I cooked up an idea and our friend Scott James helped make it happen. We started a local barter group, with a selfish motive: We wanted early summer produce – kale, spinach, lettuce, peas, strawberries – and all we had were turnips and eggs from our back yard hens. Scott started a blog for us, we wrote up a short description of what we had in mind, we shared it on Facebook and the hyper-local blogs and online groups that make up our local grapevine and the Bainbridge Barter Garden Variety Potluck in the Park was born.

Some of the offerings at our first Potluck in the Park

We meet every Saturday morning in a local park, telling anyone who’s interested to “bring a basketful and leave with a basketful”. It’s not really bartering, it’s a food gift economy. People bring whatever they have to give away, bounty from their gardens, fishing boats, and kitchens. We lay everything out on a public picnic table, take a few minutes to answer any questions about the offerings, then we announce the start of sharing and everyone digs in, filling their bags and baskets with whatever they’d like.

sharing greens at at Potluck in the Park

I’ve brought turnips, eggs, home-made kimchi, home-baked cookies, zero-waste toothpaste, rhubarb shrub, and borage. I’ve come home with kale, spinach, all sorts of other greens, potatoes, perennial herb starts for my garden, home-baked bread, cucumbers, summer squash, seeds for fall and spring vegetables, home-made yogurt, bouquets of flowers, and freshly caught crab. I missed the day when a famed local chef brought her home-made ravioli filled with goat cheese and beet greens, and there have been other amazing offerings.

Not only have the potlucks in the park fed my family this summer, participating has had a quietly profound impact on my brain’s default settings. I find myself looking for things to share, for ways to be generous. I’ve been able to break free from the scarcity model I’d been in when we were struggling a while back to pay for even basic food. We are hard-wired, I think, to share food with each other, and I feel truly blessed to have found a way to do that, to nourish and be nourished by friends and by people who were strangers until we met over a picnic table in the park.

No Impact Week: Transportation

Ah, transportation! This was the most difficult part of our first No Impact Week, and so far, that’s holding true for this round.

I had planned it all out. The girls and I would skip to the bus stop in the dawn’s clear light, and I’d get a lovely photo of the happy group of the 10+ kids at our stop helping each other onto those tall bus steps. Then I’d head home for a cup of high carbon footprint coffee (I’m weak that way) before I walked a mile and a bit up a big old hill to a meeting. I’d hitch a ride home from the meeting, and my travel for the day would be all over, with the lowest carbon footprint I could manage. La, la, la!

This didn’t mesh well with Mira’s plan for the day, which involved a sudden hatred of kindergarten, me, wearing shoes, me, catching the bus, and me (the world’s meanest mother). Ava walked to the bus on her own while I did my best to help Mira transition out of the house. No luck. In desperation, with less than one minute until bus arrival, I wrestled Mira and her shoes into our car and drove the 3 blocks to our neighborhood bus stop. I mom-handled her out of the car onto the bus just in time and waved as they drove off, Mira’s tear-stained face glaring at me through the window. I did not get a photo. I was too busy thinking that Mira might be right, I might be a true contender for World’s Meanest Mother.

Neither did I get my cup of coffee. By the time I had sent an email to Mira’s teacher, filling her in about the rather rocky start to our day, I had just enough time to find my running shoes and hit the road.

good morning spider's web

The sun was up, the air was crisp, the spiders’ webs were glittering, the last birds of summer were singing, and the world smelled like blackberries and spicy leaf mold mud. I remembered why I love walking, and how incredibly lucky I am to live here on this beautiful, beautiful island.

free roadside snack

Just as the hill was getting steep and long and I was realizing I’d be very late for the meeting, a car pulled over and I got a ride from a friend headed my way. I got a cup of coffee when we got there, in a real mug, and I caught a ride home, in a biodiesel car, no less. Perhaps I walked and carpooled enough to offset my own carbon impact from that drive to the bus stop earlier.

more walking in the sun

I worked from home and got some good things done, no transportation required, and when it was time to meet the bus, I walked. No more completely embarrassing driving the scant blocks! There was enough sunshine to make shadows, which doesn’t happen every day – More great luck! It’s so much easier to be happy about walking to and from the bus when it’s such a gorgeous day.

The bus was late, and the parents gathered at our stop talked transportation while we waited. There isn’t a viable public mass transit option for families where we live. There are buses that run in the morning and evening commuter hours, picking people up from each neighborhood and delivering them to the ferry terminal in our main town center. But if you need to travel outside of commuter hours, or want to head somewhere other than the ferry terminal or town, you need to call 24 hours in advance to reserve a trip on the Dial-A-Ride service, which uses smaller buses. For $2 per person, each way, they’ll take you exactly where you need to go. And so long as you know ahead of time exactly when you’ll need a ride home, you can arrange that, too. This works very well for many people who don’t have private transportation for a variety of reasons, but it’s not so great for unplanned trips. And life with young children is filled with many unplanned trips.

This island I live on was zoned and developed very much around the idea that everyone would drive everywhere, and we have a long way to go when it comes to mass transit. Given the economy and our local government’s lack of funds, I’m not holding my breath for a publicly funded solution.

end of the day bus stop joy

Some of my friends post to Facebook whenever they’re making a trip off the island and have room in their car and schedule to help with friends’ shopping lists or errands. I’ve seen other friends post to ask for a ride to the airport or the doctor, and there’s already a healthy family carpool culture that runs kids to all sorts of after school activities.

Instead of griping about the lack of family friendly public transportation options, we’re going to focus on growing a carpool/ride share/car share/”can I get you anything from town?” culture in our neighborhood. That’s possible and it won’t just lower our collective carbon footprint.  I’ve seen it at our school bus stop – When neighbors see each other every day, outside of our cars, when we have a few daily minutes to chat and get to know each other, real friendships and interdependence develop. It works for kids, it works for adults, and it feels good.

No Impact Week: Trash

Trash talk! One of my very, very favorite subjects. A couple of weeks ago, my girls and I parked next to the garbage trucks in the grocery store parking lot so we could look into each truck’s compressor back. The girls were sure we’d get in trouble, but no one came running to make us back away and we got a nice up-close look at all of the small hard plastic bits and remnants of plastic bags that were too small or light to be pushed into place with the larger items. I wanted so badly to reach in and pick things out, these items that looked ready to flutter to the ground. I was itching to catalog what was there so I could compare it to the lists we’ve made of plastic bits we’ve found on our local beaches and at points higher up in our local watershed. My girls saw that glint in my eyes, though, and made me promise to keep my hands off the trash.

two days' solid waste in the sunshine

Since the trash I was looking at yesterday was all ours, my girls were fine with me carrying it around. I’d collected it on our windowsill, admiring the way the clear plastic and foil caught our beautiful fall sunshine today. Here’s the non-compostable, non-reusable, non-recyclable waste we’ve produced since Sunday dawned:

2 “sealed for your protection” plastic rings, 1 from a jar of pickles, the other from a jar of broth paste (which we use instead of broth in plastic-lined Tetra Paks or cans lined with BPA).

1 crinkly plastic wrapper from a mint. The girls got dinner from a big city taco truck with their dad on Sunday, and brought this mint home to share for dessert. It’s hard to cut a mint into even pieces, but we did it and then we had this wrapper to deal with.

1 lightweight foil wrapper from a bar of Trader Joe’s fair trade chocolate. I discovered the remnant of this chocolate bar in the cabinet while I was mixing up some school snacks, and I just couldn’t resist. The paper wrapper is in the recycling bin, but I can’t recycle this foil locally.

We also produced an incredible amount of compost on Monday. I had been putting off a long-overdue (very long!) cleaning of our fridge. But we had finally reached a point where there were mere inches of space at the front of each shelf for fresh food; the rest of the space was taken up by jars and jars of mysterious things.

41 jars of food waste, heading to the compost & worm bins

41 jars, to be exact. They were evenly split between home-made frosting (I do a lot of baking for friends, and never want to throw out the frosting I don’t need for their cakes. But I don’t want to eat it, either) and mysterious brown dressings, also home-made. Judging by the numbers, I excel at mixing up sauces and dips in various shades of brown; some of them were miso-based, some fish sauce, some almond butter or peanut butter or tahini. But none of them were fresh any more, and had the mold to show for it. There were a few jars of old fruit from my batches of shrub (vinegar soda) and even some hard-boiled eggs that we all forgot to eat.

According to a federal study, the average United States citizen wastes 1 pound of food each day, that’s one pound wasted by each adult and child. I suppose our amount of waste from the fridge, which represents more than 3 months of food waste, is a bit less than that. But it’s still a lot. A shameful lot.

All of our waste is in our compost piles and worm bins now, so we’ll eventually use it to grow more food. Composting prepared but spoiled food is better than sending it to a landfill, I suppose, but it makes for a very high carbon footprint compost, that much I’m sure of. I’ve been focused on reducing our use of plastic, and we’ve made great strides in reducing our family’s solid waste, but we obviously have a long way to go when it comes to respectful use of food!

Monday's school lunch & snack

We do our best to pack zero-waste or low-waste lunches, and we bring our glass straws, wooden utensils, cloth napkins, glass and metal mugs, and dishes with us when we’re out and about. All of that has become second nature, and my girls love the food we pack to-go. Now I need to focus again on quantities at home, to keep those jars of sauces and whatnot from going into the fridge to begin with.

No Impact Week: Consumption

Miss A and Miss M are with their dad this weekend, so I’m starting our second No Impact Week experience on my own. In the strange quiet, I wrote up this list of what we’ll need to buy or bring home this week:

• Food for 2 kids, 1 adult, and 2 small dogs. We’re stocked up on chicken, cat, and parakeet food for now.
• Suet for our back yard birds.
• Jeans for me.

The food isn’t the sort of consumption this day is about for me, but the suet and jeans are. Thanks to my local Freecycle network, the suet’s all taken care of. Someone posted 7 blocks of it to the group yesterday and I was the lucky first responder. Since Liesl, my friend and cohort in living a life less plastic, was the second to reply, I’ll share the suet with her and our collective population of chickadees, nuthatches, and flickers will be happy for weeks.

Liesl and her family have been our inspiration to reduce the amount of new plastic we buy or use, and for almost two years now we’ve been working on an educational project we call Plastic Is Forever. I’ve become so obsessed with our plastic footprint, it’s invaded my dreams – A while back, I had a lovely dream in which I was traipsing along my favorite beach hand in hand with a tall handsome man, bathed in the apricot sunset light. My dream man turned to hold me, leaning low to whisper in my ear “Rebecca, there is a general consensus amongst scientists that 60 – 80% of the plastics in the ocean come from land-based use…” Even my fantasy life involves plastic, in the geekiest way possible.

It’s this obsession that motivated me to try No Impact Week last time. I wondered how much my work to reduce our plastic footprint had also reduced our carbon footprint, and I wondered how many things I’d lost sight of in my focus on plastics. “A good bit” was the answer to both of those questions so we’re back for another try, to look again into the blind spots of my plastic-framed view of life.

saggy baggy elephant pants

I have one pair of pants, jeans that I’ve been wearing almost daily for 2 years now. And either I’ve lost weight or the jeans have stretched beyond the point of no return, because along with the tissue-thin knees and mysterious stains, they just won’t stay on, not even fresh from the dryer (yes, the energy-sucking dryer). Every morning when I put them on, a voice in my head sings out “saggy baggy elephant!” and that’s not really the tackle-the-day self-image motivation I need. Since I don’t have a full time day job to report to, I can get away with 1 pair of pants and 3 shirts as my every day wardrobe, although sometimes it’s depressing.

Ever since my family’s sudden plunge into involuntary simplicity, brought about by the loss of my now-ex-husband’s job on election day 2008, we’ve been following the old “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” motto with new vigor. We dabbled in voluntary simplicity before, but there was money for back-to-school clothes and more than one pair of mom jeans. Not so these days, and that’s OK. We make it work.

School Supplies Less Plastic: DIY view binder, felted wool pencil case and book bags

To combine our vow to eliminate new plastic from our lives with our financial reality, we made some of our school supplies this year: Recycled felted wool sweaters became pencil cases and alternatives to Ziploc bags for school books; we turned a recycled paper binder into the plastic view window binder on Miss M’s kindergarten supply list.

I like this living with less plastic and less in general. There are days when I envy other people their new things, but that generally fades away quickly enough. But sometimes new clothes are a necessity, and this is one of those times. I need new jeans. In honor of No Impact Week, I’ve posted a “Wanted: jeans” request to Freecycle. Normally, I’d head to the thrift store to spend two hours torturing myself by trying on used jeans, but I thought I’d give this more local option a try. I’ve never asked our Freecycle group for clothing before, but if this works, I’ll have a pair of jeans that I can wear in public without the 35 minute drive to our closest affordable thrift store. Jeans for free, with no plastic packaging, and with a much smaller carbon footprint than usual: This is my consumption dream for the week.

Again with the No Impact Week

We’re excited to join this round of No Impact Week with YES! Magazine. Yesterday was Consumption Day and today is Trash Day…I’ll be part of a worldwide blogging team posting via the YES! website about our experience this time around. It’s not too late to join the carbon cleansing fun! Really, it IS fun.

eating local, Rock Farmer style

 

No Impact Week Photo Awards — YES! Magazine

We’re very happy that YES! Magazine chose three of our photos from No Impact Week for their slideshow- Thanks, YES! No Impact Week Photo Awards — YES! Magazine.

No Impact Fail: Filthy Plastic Hypocrite

Or Forbidden Fruit: How My Life as a Schoolyard Sugar Dealer Has Impacted My Thoughts on Plastic Toys

I am a filthy plastic hypocrite. Tomorrow is M’s birthday, so her preschool party is this afternoon. She requested swirled chocolate and fruit cupcakes with swirled blue and green icing, each topped with a plastic sea creature.

My general rule is that, when it’s my money, I get to choose alternatives to plastic. If my kids want plastic toys, they get to spend their own money on them, with no commentary, guilt, or shame piled onto them from me. Most of the time, they have fun finding plastic-free alternatives to things, but there are certain plastic toys that they love and spend a lot of time playing with. It has taken a good bit of work with various therapists to help my kids learn how to play, and I have to admit that I’m not all that torn up about their plastic toys. I’m so happy to see them playing, really playing, with each other, and even alone, I’ve made my peace with this. My hypocrisy bothers me, yes, but the real progress we’ve made in terms of typical play skills must be what keeps me from torturing myself about this in the quiet of the night.

pandas and bamboo, made of marzipan, chocolate & natural coloring

For birthdays, we have a different set of rules. The birthday person chooses their favorite food for the day, and can select whatever they like for their birthday dessert. So far, I’ve been asked to bake all birthday treats, but the day may come when a supermarket cake is the only thing that will do. That will require some serious self-control my part, to keep from wailing about being passed over for one of our local store’s cake lady’s amazing creations, but I’ll follow the birthday rules. Last year, we didn’t have birthday parties, and the year before I was tasked with making marzipan sculptures colored with natural food dyes for their cakes: M wanted pandas and bamboo while A wanted Ursula K. Le Guin’s Red Mare and her foal.

The Red Mare & her foal, made from marzipan and natural coloring

This year, A wanted those crunchy artificially colored sugar bits, the ones stuck to a piece of cardboard, from the grocery store’s cake decor section. M wanted plastic sea creatures, not marzipan, not wood, not felted wool, only plastic sea creatures; also no marine mammals, only sharks and bony fish. And the frosting needed to be dyed with artificial coloring, as my natural green and blue food dyes weren’t the right shade.

So that’s what she got. I just delivered a tray of 15 gluten-free chocolate-squash cupcakes with chemically colored blue and green frosting, topped with 11 plastic sea creatures (the teachers had to do without the plastic critters on theirs) to her class, along with a happy birthday M.

For all that I hate plastic when it’s not a life-saving device, I am a hypocrite when it comes to my kids’ toys, their own purchases, and birthday cake decor. I know my attitude is colored by my experience growing up; in my effort to keep plastic from becoming an alluring forbidden fruit, I willingly purchase the nasty stuff, thereby modeling hypocrisy for my children.

When my sisters and I were growing up, our parents forbade sugar. My mother is an amazing cook and baker, and provided us with all sorts of truly tasty desserts: Wheat germ banana bars, cheesecakes made with eggs from our chickens and geese, raspberry bavarian, gingerbread with lemon sauce, to name just a few of her greatest hits. But we were not supposed to eat candy. At Halloween, we went trick-or-treating only for Unicef, not for candy; if anyone offered us a Milky Way to go with their spare change donation to our orange cardboard collection boxes, we were under strict orders to politely but clearly refuse the sugary gift.

I don’t think this drove my sisters crazy, but it motivated me to pursue a secret life as a candy pusher when I was 12. I commuted across the sound from our island to a school in the big city, and got myself to class each morning on the city bus. In the beginning, my parents gave me quarters to pay for the bus, but then they switched to paper bus tickets. During my after school exploration of the city, I discovered an import store that sold gigantic multi-colored gobstoppers, huge hard spheres of sugar, for just 50 cents. I had a lust for those candies, but didn’t have any pocket-money or allowance to pay for one. I figured out a system to get cash for candy:

I collected morning and afternoon paper transfers from the floor of the bus, from the sidewalks, and from my fellow students. I kept these in a zippered pouch to keep them clean, and when I had a large enough collection, I could find one that worked for almost every day’s fare. The bus system changed the transfer color and letter each day, but I could turn a purple R into a K with judicious finger placement and the right nonchalant body language as I flashed the transfer at the bus driver when we arrived  at my stop.

Whenever I could ride the bus for free that way, I’d trade my paper bus tickets with one of the kids at my bus stop whose parents trusted them with cold, hard change.

I’d run from my return bus stop after school down the waterfront to the import store and buy as many gobstoppers as I could afford.

The next day at school, I’d sell these .50 candies for $1 each to my fellow students at school, kids who had never seen these delights anywhere else so they didn’t know they were being overcharged.

Then I’d take my profits and buy candy, candy, candy. First I bought myself a gobstopper, but then, tucked into the lobby of a skyscraper, I found a tiny old-fashioned candy store whose proprietor was happy to sell me small white paper bags of this and that every afternoon.

I ran this side business until I ran out of takers for the gobstoppers, at which point I lost my huge profits, but could still trade bus tickets for change to spend on candy.

I think back on this now and sort of admire my ingenuity while I’m also disturbed by the depth of my need for sugar. But mostly I’m impressed by the power of forbidden fruit. I have nightmares that my kids will grow up to be PR executives for Dow Chemical or faux scientists whose “research” is funded by oil companies. Right now, letting them make their own choices, even when that includes some things I really do not want in our lives/floating onto our beaches/entering our food web, seems like one of the ways I can avoid turning plastic into a tool they use as they grow into independence. But there is no getting around the fact that I know better and choose hypocrisy.

No Impact Week, Day 8: Eco-Shabbat

My family’s weekly Shabbat is from sundown on Friday to Saturday night when three stars twinkle in the sky; we added Sunday’s Eco-Shabbat theme to our Saturday and Sunday for some extra relaxation and joy this weekend. I am far from Orthodox or Conservative in my observance of Shabbat, but this difference in observance does not change the importance of Shabbat to me and my children. I love Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel‘s description of Shabbat as “a palace in time“. I strive to keep and remember Shabbat by building a palace in time with my family each week.

Every Friday afternoon, we do our best to tidy up the week’s clutter around the house, and definitely in the dining room and living room. Then we turn to making things sweet and beautiful. The kids each have their own special vase used only on Shabbat, and we like to fill these with finds from our yard – Even in the dead of winter, there are bits of beauty we can bring inside to grace our table: Bare twigs from our willow tree, feathers dropped by the Steller’s Jays that raid our bird feeder, dried leaves and seed heads. We make our favorite dinner and dessert, we put on our favorite music, then we light our candles and say the Shabbat blessings. Sometimes we sing out loud, we share our favorite moments from the past week and things we’re grateful for. My main rules for Shabbat are this: We do things as a family, things that bring us joy, things that are not our jobs or regular work. We don’t spend money to buy things, although we do sometimes spend money on experiences (to catch a ferry to see friends, a trip to the zoo). I try very, very hard to find ways to say “yes!” whenever my kids ask me a question:  Can you read this book to me right this minute? Can I play outside in the snow wearing only my underpants and my glittery sandals? Yes, if it makes you happy and doesn’t hurt anyone, yes! Admittedly, our whole Shabbat observance is a work in progress, with things shifting and changing over time as I figure out what feeds the holiness of the day and what erodes that palace in time.

I know, I know, my level of observance doesn’t count as observant at all in the eyes and hearts of many of my faith. That’s OK with me; I’m working with all my heart, all my soul, all my might (or all my “very” as one of my rabbis likes to translate it) to live my life so that the still, small voice within me sings in joy, and that’s enough for me. As Rabbi Shefa Gold writes, “You must dig down beneath the soil of  your everyday life and find its holiness.” I find that making Shabbat every week helps us to do that.

The traditional rules of observance for Shabbat are eco-friendly at their core. Some of the modern practices, such as leaving lights on for the duration of Shabbat, so as to avoid both stumbling in the dark and having to flip the switch between off and on, seem to have an impact on the earth that isn’t kadosh (holy). Of course, my own practice of driving my car to meet friends at the beach on Shabbat must have an even worse impact.

We talked about this on Sunday, and I think we’re all agreed that we’ll start adding some of the more traditional Shabbat practices regarding use of resources to our own observance. I like this intersection of the No Impact Project and my own spiritual path.