Small acts and restraints

A while ago, when we lived in Urbana, IL, I made this poster with my friend Micah Bornstein. It is a hand carved wood block plate print, with letterpress type, printed on a Vandercook proofpress. It says,  “Preserve” at the top and, “a kitchencentric life” at the bottom. We made the poster to talk about becoming aware of place. Focusing on everyday activities like growing and preserving food, tending to the soil and the home. We had a lot of discussions about how developing a local awareness of where your food comes from and how it is prepared, or how you live on an everyday level, can also produce an ecological awareness of the larger environment. This poster project came out of those discussions. It is now hanging in our kitchen in Copenhagen, where we are working to figure out how to develop an ecological relationship with our new home.

Yesterday, I received a letter from Micah with a quote from Wendell Berry, the poet farmer.  It said:

“Soil is not usually lost in slabs or heaps of magnificent tonnage. It is lost a little at a time over millions of acres by careless acts of millions of people. It cannot be solved by heroic feats of gigantic technology, but only by millions of small acts and restraints.”

A relevant statement, not merely because it deals with soil, the base of all growing things, but because Berry points to how the ecology of a place begins with the soil and extends outward, through the actions and reactions, to all things within an ecosystem.

As we move into this transitional period of year’s end, we  here at the Mythological Quarter, are thinking about the “small acts and restraints” that are part of our everyday life and how it effects the larger ecosystems we move through –from the kitchen to the garden and beyond.

Now more than ever as we welcome our daughter, Ada Katherine Fortune Bloom, into the world, are we considering how we live in it.

Happy holidays from the Mythological Quarter. We will be back in January with more posts and book reviews.