Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Always Learning

November 18, 2005
Rev. Darcey Laine

Sabbatical Episode 5: Sustainability and White Lotus

About half way through the semester at University of Creation Spirituality, another weekly class began. It was called “Creating Sustainable Communities” and was taught by Lauren de Boer, a former student of UCS and Editor of Earthlight magazine. When I had registered earlier that winter, I felt this was the most important class I would take. I didn’t care so much about theology and theory as the practical considerations of how we build a greener world right now.

But as the first day of class approached, I was nervous about the kind of overwhelm and burn out that can happen when we see the radical change required to restore the health of our earth. As we sat in those folding chairs with collapsible writing desks, Lauren gave a short lecture on the state of our environment, as laid out in the UN Millennium Eco System Assessment. I had known we were in trouble, but it was still hard to hear the truth, especially from such a neutral and highly regarded body as the UN. Then he started giving concrete examples of how communities around the world creating real change. The most stunning of these was Curitiba, Brazil, where mayor Jaime Lerner added 17 new parks, 90 miles of bike paths, and increased the city’s recycling rate to 2/3, and their public transit rate to 70%. Abandoned buildings were converted to community centers. 1.5 million seedlings were planted and cultivated by the street children who participated in a meals program.

That was the last lecture we ever had. The next week we met on the sunroof of a building designed by “Eco-City Builders” an architectural firm that designs buildings and urban areas to have a lighter footprint on the earth. Then we spent the second half of our class touring creek beds that had been “daylighted” which refers to the process of uncovering the many creeks sent underground as cities were built in the last century.

For our next class we gathered at the Spiral Gardens in Berkeley. This garden was grown on unused BART land, to bring fresh produce to South West Berkeley, a low income neighborhood like so many others not able to attract a Grocery store. Then we walked over to the Oholone Community Garden, which incorporated art, native plants and even a cob shed, again using vacant BART land.

The next week we trekked out to the San Francisco Recycling Education center which houses an Artist in Residence program. We met the brand new Artist, Andrew Junge, who receives a stipend to work full time at the dump for 4 months creating art from only the materials found there. From there we toured the actual waste collection center, our minds blown by the mass and smell of it. Then we toured a surprising sculpture garden with works by many of the artists who have participated in this program over the past 15 years. As an amazing bit of good luck, our teacher had wrangled us an invitation to the home of Jo Hansen, the artist who founded the program. We heard her story and looked at her wonderful collection of recycled art.

For our final project we were to explore a sustainable program, write a paper on the experience and present to the rest of the class. I wanted to find out more about sustainable endeavors in our own bioregion, and so volunteered for a couple shifts at the Acterra Native Plants Nursery which grows plants for the Sanfransisquito watershed using only seeds from plants found already living here in the watershed. After so many classes in theology and cosmology, it was wonderful to have my hands in soil, planting seedlings in their first pots.

It was after one of these class tours in Berkeley that I jumped back in my car and took the highly un-sustainable drive down to Santa Barbara for my first ever yoga retreat at the White Lotus Retreat Center. I arrived just in time for a wonderful vegetarian meal on cushions around the low table in the main hall. For 4 days I lived in a beautiful white yurt at the bottom of a steep hill and practiced yoga morning and afternoon, with evenings of talk about yoga that ended early (we were all quite tired). That place had a very particular feel to it, and I copied all my strange dreams into my journal. The retreat ended too soon, but I enjoyed the long winding drive north through the empty hills and valleys; a calm transition back to my ordinary life.

Stay tuned! In our next installment: Gaia and Gratitude ...