Sunday, January 04, 2009

Greenage in the sky, holes in my minds

My mind is going yet again. This time if I were to put it in quick words it would be: Vertical greenhousing, poverty and how I could have an affect on it, living in community and what that means, how I can better live in community intentionally, what can I do to cause a stir in my children's minds, how can I make art a huge part of my life, how can I live without chemicals going into my body and still be mentally healthy/stable...... and I'm just getting started.

Yeah, it's never easy inside my head. Well. we are back from our trip to Indiana and it was wonderful. We visited our family and got to spend much needed time with all of them. Scotty's sister, who has been sick for a long time now with many different health issues, has recently went through a whipple procedure that rerouted her digestive system after removing a part of her pancreas. She has been suffering with pancreatitis for almost two years now. Everything she eats gets tossed back out before it can be digested and on top of that malnutrition, she's been in some excrutiating pain. When we last saw her, she was very pale, and swollen. She was in the hospital and just miserable. This time when we saw her it was like looking at a whole other person. She had lost a lot of weight due to the lack of nutrition, but also she seemed emotionally better. Her pain is down more now than it has been in many years, and she's not throwing up as much as she has been this past year. She has a feeding tube that provide her body with food, but the nutritional absorbtion is no where near what it could be if her body could handle the digesting of the foods properly.

I do ask you all to be praying for her recovery of this and to keep moving strong on God's path.

While I was up in South Dakota this year I learned a great deal about solar energy and vertical greenhousing. AMAZING stuff. They are now building greenhouses where the plants are inside these sheets of plastic or something that hang vertically. They are rotated throughout and the sun shines right on through. With this you get organic plants and food without having to prep land and wait years for it to become organically certified land. On top of that you use a watering system that gets recycled with a pond on the lowest level where the fish live and reproduce and in turn they clear the water of any acids or gases that would normally prevent the water to be properly reused. To energize such a system they put solar panels all around to help cut the costs. For one acre of vertical greenhousing it is equal to 30 acres of horizontal land farming. HUGE. On top of that you can provide food cheaper, no need for pestisides or huge farming equipment, gas to run it. And if it were on rooftops, no land to buy, just renting/buying of the space.

And then learning this, I headed down here in Dallas. Right now I'm currently going to school full time to become a nurse or diagnostic sonographer. Why do I not yet know what I want to go for? Mostly it is due to the fact that I am a dreamer. I dream of many ways that God can have my family living radically in ways most people couldn't even imagine possible. Most of the time I don't even see how it could be possible, but I still go ahead and dream of the many different aspects of how God views the possibiliies of our lives. It's not all about me, ya know. I love the medical fields. I can grasp it and understand it. My mother is a nurse, and it all just seemed to make sense to me. There would always be a job for me, I would be in the care of people and with people. It was a great way for me to reach out to people that also had a financial security.

Don't get me wrong, I love the medical field. I just wish I knew what I really want to be when I grow up....if I grow up.

On top of the vertical greenhousing coming back up into my mind, I've been finding myself in a bunch of different conversations about people who are homeless, and poverty, and how if more people cared there would not even be poverty. I watched a part of an interview of Shane Claireborn about what he has learned about poverty and working and building towards a solution and getting people involved. What would it look like if I dedicated my life to such a cause. How huge of a difference would I be able to make? None really without God backing me every step of the way. But I believe in a God that has endless possibilities and I believe that I am anything He makes me to be.

I guess one thing I always struggle with when I go on these tangents is how can I do that while being mother and wife? Is this what I am built for? Do I have the guts to attempt this let alone try those shoes on? What if we could all just gather together, unite the church as a whole and build to solve the hunger, solve it without killing our planet anymore, and in turn possibly make this planet better than it was before? If we were mto incorporate verticale greehousing in many, many places, we could replace the deadened farm lands into a home for trees and other plants.

Another ordeal crossing the mind of insanity is how would our house look if we did this community living on a more intentional scale. If we got more organized in our doing and following God more. If we focused more on bringing God to the center of it all and keeping Him there. Praying more, spending time together more, relating more. Also what kind of boundaries do we need to set up? How can we provide a strong community with each other that is shared amongst those we are constantly around? Digging into Scotty's library soon and will be having many discussions with the adults in the house.

I guess I need to get some sleep. I hope to finish this blog too, but like my others it may not happen totally. Blessings upon you.