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08 Feb 04:13

Saturday Linkages: The week I discovered the honey buzzard

by Mr. Homegrown
28 Apr 20:35

The One Piece of Instruction I've Ever Followed

by Heather

Emily

Our garden is perched on a decent patch of southeastern exposure, but the remainder of our property slopes northward and releases snow with great reluctance. I hope the Easter Bunny doesn’t mind snow. Speaking of, for the quintessentially Currier & Ives feeling most holidays evoke in New England, Easter is not one of them. If you grow up here, you have childhood memories of your mother dressing you in the prettiest short sleeve cotton gingham Easter dress, lace edged bobby socks on your feet, and maybe even a new pair of Salt Water sandals, but the whole Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm ensemble was then swaddled up in a wool coat with hat, scarf, mittens - the works! Easter is cold around here, sometimes there’s even snow. Mother’s Day might feel like spring. Memorial Day, probably

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I have a new dentist and at my recent appointment it came up that my daughter, now twenty, has never had a cavity. This dentist does not have children and is not a pediatric dentist, so she was intrigued. She began to ask questions about our at home dental routines because even though her practice does not include many children, she has plenty of parents as patients, and according to her, it is not the norm to make it to twenty without a cavity. As much as I wanted to claim it was my child’s pristine diet of raw milk, bone broth and sardines (ha!) that brought her to adulthood dentally unscathed, the truth is, as I shared with her, Adam and I took full charge of Emily’s dental care until she was ten years old. The expression on her face told me 1) I clearly haven’t mentioned this to too many people before, and 2) she had never heard of anyone doing this before. Which is exactly what she told me. 

Great, why can't I ever be normal. (I was not brave enough to tell her we don’t use fluoride. Gasp!)

She asked for a few specifics, so I let her know we could not take credit for this rare parenting victory, that we only followed instructions from Emily’s pediatric dentist. When we took Emily for her very first appointment, maybe age two or three, we distinctly remember Dr. Lucy saying, “Everything looks great, now remember, her teeth are your responsibility until she is ten years old. She can do the morning brushing, that’s fine, but nighttime flossing and brushing is on you.” It might be the one piece of instruction I’ve ever followed in my life. 

One might think once Emily turned ten she’d abandon our nighttime regimen, I wondered myself, but that didn’t happen. The habit of flossing and thorough brushing were so deeply ingrained in her at that point, we passed the torch with ease and she carried on. She’s off at college now and has a new dentist closer to school. I have to admit I was expecting a disruption in her perfect record with dorm life and the potential for changing habits, but she’s stayed on track and as of her last six month checkup, is still without cavities. 

Not sure why I’m sharing this except to say that my new dentist (who I admit is on the young side, though I’ve reached the point in life where all medical professionals seem young) has never heard of this at-home practice before and she couldn’t seem to stop praising the idea. She said she was going to start recommending it to her patients with young children at home. So I thought maybe it is worth mentioning here, in case it can be an ah-ha moment for another parent, as it was for us. I guess we always thought there could be a correlation between our taking charge of Emily’s teeth and her absence of cavities, but we also thought maybe it was a fluke, too. After talking with this new dentist, I realized all that care and attention to the choppers didn’t hurt, that’s for sure.

Cheers to small parenting victories... because we all know we're 99% hacking our way through.

03 Jan 18:46

Practical, Positive and Peaceable

by Mr. Homegrown
Gitana

must listen

I have a rule about Root Simple content that I call the three “Ps:” keep all posts practical, positive and peaceable (by peaceable I mean non-divisive). This is not to say that I think that we should all put our heads in the sand and ignore the important issue of our time. But if you want strife and conflict there’s plenty of options, especially on the web, and I don’t need to add my voice to the din.

So, ironically, I spent many hours over the past few days writing a cranky blog post that violated all of the “Ps.” In it I railed against Facebook, Elon “Rocket Man” Musk’s techno-utopianism and the horrible day LA politicians and film industry lobbyists stole the green bike lanes on Spring street. While these issues are significant, my post didn’t have anything new to say. I fell into the knee-jerk belligerence trap that Charles Eisenstein said we have to get past in a prescient lecture at St. James Church in London back in 2016. I listened to that lecture again last night and I suggest you listen too if you haven’t already (this is the second time I’ve posted it). In the lecture, Eisenstein articulates a new narrative outside of the old story of “separation.” Eisenstein says,

But on the other hand, we do know what to do. And often what we need to do are precisely those things that seem irrelevant. The heart says yes to them, but the mind says how could that possibly help? How could it possibly help to spend ten years trying to free one orca from captivity? How could it possibly help to spend ten years taking care of one old woman with Alzheimer’s? The things that draw us, our world story does not have a place for them, so they seem impractical, they seem unrealistic or naïve. But when we understand the deep root of the crisis, which is the totality of the story of separation that surrounds us, then we see that yeah, these are actually essential, because they change the foundation of the world-destroying machine . . .

On a personal level, it’s almost a cliché, but bringing more love into the world. And also on a community level, also through what you devote your life energy toward. If it doesn’t fit into the story of separation, if it’s dedicated to bringing beauty, love compassion…..this is not news to anybody, right? But I guess the reason I’m saying it is to illuminate the political dimension of it. And maybe that’s what the song is. To listen to what is beautiful, to what calls to your heart. Maybe that’s the organ that listens to the song, that guides you to do things that the mind, which is still lost in the maze, may not recognize as relevant, but which is actually our path to that more beautiful world that we remember and recognize and carry with us.

In between working on that unsuccessful and angry blog post I was finishing the dovetailed drawers I had constructed over the holidays. Rather than wasting time trying to fight Facebook I could have been writing up a post about those drawers. As Eisenstein suggests, perhaps its time to do the things that don’t make sense and that don’t seem important: pursue beauty, grow something, build something. Stay tuned for a post on those dovetails . . .