hope-is-my-middle-name

What’s in the Water: West Virginia’s WaterKeeper on the Future of America’s Rivers

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 08:42:19 GMT

West Virginia is a mythical place

wildly misunderstood and often overlooked, chock full of natural resources and endless stunning vistas, despite having been ravaged by extractive industries and left to pick up the pieces of the energy transition in real-time.

My family comes from West Virginia; from Sicily and Scotland, they settled in the hills of Appalachia, which may have looked a little like the Highlands, a little like Mount Etna. They came for the coal, or the promise of a gainful employment. My grandfather worked in the mines until he worked his way out of them, landing a more sustainable job driving truck. He died of cancer when he was 35.

Although I never met him, I looked for him every summer in those misty mountains, winding our way back to Coalton with the windows down, my mom singing along to John Denver.

Almost Heaven, West Virginia isn’t just coal mines and country roads. Called the Birthplace of Rivers, the state sits on the Eastern Continental Divide, where 40 rivers and 56,000 miles of streams provide drinking water for millions of people from the Chesapeake Bay out to the Gulf of Mexico.

And yet, while West Virginia serves the country with her pristine headwater streams, entire counties in the state have been on boil water alerts for decades, with wells contaminated by coal mining and fracking, with no infrastructure for clean drinking water, with no real plan, no funding, no future. Compounding that are issues of poverty, addiction, and food insecurity. With limited access to jobs, education, broadband, and basic infrastructure, West Virginia's population continues to dwindle and it leads the nation in opioid deaths.

Where is the hope for a place like West Virginia? That’s what we’re looking for on this season finale episode of Hope Is My Middle Name and it's a surprisingly uplifting listen. As my guest, Angie Rosser says, “Come to West Virginia and you'll meet the best people in the world."

After exploring the state recently with Made In America , I really believe that West Virginia could lead the nation in a new way of living, a way that works with nature, not against it. I asked Angie, from her perspective heading up West Virginia Rivers Coalition , what a thriving West Virginia would look like.

“A preservation of certain elements of our heritage and cultural identity, which means commitment to community and family and sense of place and connection to the woods and waters. I think we're well-positioned geographically, resource-wise, to have this paradigm shift around what it means to develop natural resources [...] as something to preserve and hold up, as something we are the keepers of. You can experience this and it will make meaning for your life, your family, your connection to nature, and the bigger world around us. So I'm excited about that and that’s why I'm not leaving. I'm staying here.”

Have you been to West Virginia? Do you have a connection there? I would love to hear what you’ve discovered along those country roads. Leave a comment on Youtube or DM me on Instagram .

“The way we take care of nature and creation and the life around us is a reflection of how we take care of ourselves and each other as fellow human beings.”

— Angie Rosser

Understanding HOMElessness with Mobile Loaves & Fishes

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 07:57:20 GMT

I met Alan Graham on the other side of a Google search

for sustainable homes for the homeless. I had heard of communities working on innovative housing solutions, like Seattle where people are building tiny homes in their backyards with the help of groups like the The Block Project . But then I stumbled upon Community First! Villag e, an enclave of 400+ chronically homeless residents now living in permanent homes alongside neighbors and friends.

I had so many questions. How do you even begin to develop a place like this? How do you manage the ever-evolving needs of a population accustomed to being underserved, disregarded, unwanted? How do you organize systems to support the only approach that could work, a full-scale holistic overhaul of what it means to serve the homeless, and to live in community with one another.

Our understanding of homelessness in America varies based on geography, privilege, and personal experience. Even the way we talk about homelessness is fraught with preconceived notions and misconceptions. Do we call people “homeless,” or are they “unhoused?” How many times do we give cash to the guy on the corner before it makes a difference? Do we give him anything at all? If I stop and listen to this person in the parking lot, will they just spin me a story? Are they dangerous? Why are people in the richest country in the world living without shelter? Who is responsible for fixing this? Who decides?

I asked all of these questions and then I met Shirley.

I'm drinking coffee on a gray winter's morning in Nashville, and from my apartment window I can see the line of traffic on Hermitage Ave spilling into downtown. But today on the sidewalk, there’s a woman in a colorful dress with several bags slung over her shoulders. She’s bending down in the tiny space between the chain link fence and the sidewalk picking up something off the ground, over and over, like she’s harvesting flowers. But nothing grows there.

More out of curiosity than generosity, metered with my usual social anxiety, I leave my apartment and cross the street with a cup of coffee and a muffin. I’m not sure if she’s homeless, and I don’t want to offend her, but nobody hangs out on that tiny stretch of sidewalk and it is breakfast time. I introduce myself and we get to talking. Her name is Shirley. She’s just a few years younger than me. She's on the run from a bad relationship in Georgia, but she's had to leave her kids behind and she needs to get them back. I offer to buy her breakfast at the diner next door and she declines, but we agree to meet the next day and talk some more. Oh, and she was collecting tiny leaves to make into paper.

I am determined to get her some help. Surely in a town as resourced as Nashville, with a well-connected advocate, it will be simple enough. I start making calls. Nobody can take her in. She isn’t on drugs. She doesn’t have a disability. She isn’t mentally ill. She isn’t an addict. She isn’t a resident of Tennessee, and she might not be an American citizen. Her plan to start a business selling stationery, well that’s the best thing we’ve got.

We come to this conclusion over breakfast at McDonalds inside Walmart where we're picking up toiletries and other basics. All her belongings are now temporarily stored in the trunk of my Honda Civic. She asks me to take her to a suburb outside of Nashville. She thinks she might have a lead there, someone who knows where her kids are.

We drive for twenty minutes and stop at a library just off the interstate. I help her sign up for an email address. It requires a backup phone number and I enter mine. Is that dangerous? I wonder. Who knows. She struggles to log in on her own and I worry that my messages to her will just sit there, unread, locked behind a password neither of us can remember.

And that is what appears to have happened. When we part ways that day she says, "I’ll be back in Nashville soon,” and I say, “Don’t forget to check your email, so we can find each other.” I do see her again, a few days later walking down Hermitage Ave, but I’m late for work and traffic is moving fast. I wave as I drive by, but she doesn’t see me.

The next day I buy a cell phone, a pay-by-the-month deal. I want to give it to Shirley so she can call me, or call for help, or maybe even call her kids if she can get their number. I wait by my window but she doesn’t show up. I send email after email. I walk down by the river, under bridges, where people without houses build fires to cook dinner. She’s not there.

Then, a huge storm hits Nashville. The river swells. They say a handful of people died down there, homeless people caught in the flood and the high winds. I have no way of knowing where Shirley is. Or if she is still alive. A month goes by and I cancel the cell phone. I hope and pray that she’s made it to Georgia and is living with her kids today.

My first direct encounter with homelessness left me feeling helpless. And the helplessness I felt was nothing compared with what Shirley faced daily. I had considered inviting her to stay with me in my tiny studio apartment, but in talking with some friends in social services I was advised against it.

I had no idea how hard it is to get up off the streets once you find yourself living there. In the United States, the odds that you or someone you know will end up homeless are as slim as 1 percent of 1 percent. But the chances that you will move from chronic homelessness to a permanently housed situation can seem just as dire.

That’s why what Alan Graham is doing with Mobile Loaves & Fishes struck me as incredible. Talking with him changed the way I see homelessness, and, home. In 25 years of serving the homeless, Alan has seen a common denominator emerge among the many causes of homelessness . It’s not addiction or job loss or mental illness. Those all are big issues, but they are often just symptoms.

The single greatest cause of homelessness is a profound, catastrophic loss of family.

If you don’t have family, blood or otherwise, to support you through major life changes, to share a meal with you when you’re hungry, to give you a place to stay when the house you’ve always lived in becomes suddenly unaffordable, if you’ve got no safety net, nowhere to turn, then you are in a tiny sliver of the US population that makes up a large proportion of our homeless.

And if that is the case, we have a great deal of responsibility as neighbors, friends, and community members to alleviate this suffering. But what about other entities? What role does the government play? What about the private sector? It will take ALL of us to repair the confluence of catastrophic scenarios that have caused this crisis, especially in cities like Seattle, Nashville, Los Angeles, and San Francisco where people are being priced out of their generational homes. And then there are the ongoing impacts of inflation, evidenced by widespread food insecurity – 44.2 million Americans going to bed hungry, unsure where their next meal will come from.

So yeah, the causes are formidable and many. But the root cause, maybe we can address it. Maybe it’s more about the slow build of relationship, the strengthening of community, the fabric of our faith in each other. Maybe it’s about coming together instead of splitting apart.

I wish I had found a way to stay connected with Shirley. She gave me the gift of her trust, but we didn’t have enough time, or at least I didn’t know at the time how to be of help. I’m not sure I do now. But I am watching people like Alan and I am learning.

Stats and Resources

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

650,000 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2023, a 12% increase from 2022.
Nearly 4 in 10 people experiencing homelessness identified as Black, African American, or African. People who identify as Black made up just 13 percent of the total U.S. population but comprised 37 percent of all people experiencing homelessness.
Nearly one-third of people experiencing homelessness identified as Hispanic or Latin(o/a/x). The number of people experiencing homelessness who identified as Hispanic or Latin(o/a/x) increased by 28% between 2022 and 2023. People who identify as Hispanic or Latin(o/a/x) made up 55 percent of the total increase in people experiencing homelessness between 2022 and 2023. Most of this increase (33,772 people) was among people in sheltered settings.
More than a quarter of adults experiencing homelessness were over the age of 54. Twenty percent (98,393) were aged 55 to 64 and 8% (39,696) were over the age of 64.

What You Can Do

Find detailed information on your state’s homeless statistics, bed inventory, and system capacity from the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

Read the recent NYTimes article on Mobile Loaves & Fishes: “Can a Big Village Full of Tiny Homes Ease Homelessness in Austin?”

Watch the Mobile Loaves & Fishes 25th Anniversary Tribute on YouTube

Support Mobile Loaves & Fishes by shopping online in their community market, visiting their farmers market, staying in their Community Inn for your next trip to Austin, volunteering or donating funds at mlf.org

How a Philly Bouncer Became an Organic Farmer: Kegan Hilaire’s Journey to Sustainable Agriculture

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 07:57:19 GMT

Food. Everybody needs it , not everybody gets it in the same ways at the same levels of freshness and nutrition. And with human population projected to reach over 9 billion by 2050 , how are we gonna grow all that food?

To kick off this season of the HOPE Is My Middle Name podcast we’re looking at food, how we get it, how we grow it, and how our biggest challenges might require smaller solutions. And since I’ve been spending a lot of time with farmers across America, I figured there was one out there who could show us a thing or two about the BIG the impact of small farmers.

Enter Kegan Hilaire, a nightclub bouncer who found himself in the middle of a field with a handful of seeds and a dream to bring healthy, organic food to everyone, especially those who can least afford it. Today, Kegan is the owner of Blackbird Farms, an organic vegetable farm in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and as Small Farms and Diversified Vegetable Consultant for Rodale Institute, he’s helping other folks start their own sustainable agriculture ventures.

It began with an egg. One fateful day, Kegan cracked open a pasture-raised organic egg with an impossibly orange yolk and he wondered, “Why is this egg so much better than the ones in the grocery store?” Well, it turns out, we are what we eat, eats. Eggs from a happy pasture-raised chicken eating organic feed, they’re gonna look happy and taste even happier.

Kegan was sold. He would leave his career in sales, go back to bouncing at night and work mornings on a farm to figure out how he could grow healthy organic food for the future.

Here are some takeaways from the incredible journey he shares with us on Hope Is My Middle Name .

Small Change Big Growth

As a complete beginner, Kegan turned his parents backyard into a market-garden CSA supporting 110 people on ⅛ of an acre . He went on to start Blackbird Farms which operates entirely on the CSA model, with a sliding scale and at least 10% of shares set aside for those who can’t afford them.

What’s a CSA? It’s a subscription-style service offered by farmers to the public often in the form of weekly “shares.” A “share” is usually a box of fresh vegetables and fruit, with other tasty farm products sometimes included.

Why did Kegan build his business on the CSA model?

“80% of people who join a CSA will join another one, even if they leave. You've forever changed how a lot of those people get fruits and vegetables. It doesn't come from a store anymore, it comes from a farm. [...] It really changes how people look at and access food for the rest of their lives.”

Healthy Food

And why does this matter? Local, organic food is better for your health. According to Rodale Institute:

“The food we eat today contains less protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, and vitamin C than food produced just a half-century ago.”

What changed half-century ago? We moved away from small local farming and into mass-produced industrial agriculture that favored high yields over nutrition, flavor, and soil health. With that mass-production, we started importing massive amounts of food. According to Jose Garcia, operations manager of Houston’s Moonflower Farms, 66% of the food that we import across the Mexican border goes to waste . And considering most produce loses 30% of its nutrients within 3 days of harvest , buying local is just better math.

Healthy Economy

Speaking of math, supporting local agriculture keeps dollars in our communities, which is good for everyone.

“The Young Farmers Coalition quoted that 96% of what small farms purchase are purchased within a 50 mile radius. So the shirts that we have for the farm were union-made in the US and screen printed down the street from my parents' house.”

I’d rather buy a t-shirt from my neighbor than from H&M. With local farms, we get to meet the folks who labored to grow and produce our food. That is powerful. We need them, and they need us.

And they need good soil. CSAs like Kegan’s offer composting, which offsets that unfortunate reason some of us subscribe to a CSA and then cancel. We don’t always have time to cook that delicious produce. But one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. If you don’t eat your zucchini, it goes right back to where it came from, enriching the soil for another harvest. How’s that for regenerative agriculture?

Healthy Soil

Soil is everything. Remember the Dust Bowl? Industrial agriculture, deforestation, and widespread development have severely depleted our topsoil. Scientists project we have only 60 years of topsoil left . With composting and regenerative agriculture , we can restore the soil which means we can keep growing food.

But as Jonathan Foley writes in National Geographic, “55 percent of the world’s crop calories feed people directly; the rest are fed to livestock (about 36 percent) or turned into biofuels and industrial products (roughly 9 percent).”

The good news, Kegan tells us, is that:

“Most of the edible crops for humanity, like 90% of them, come from smallholder farms around the world. They're on less than five acres, they're growing independently, they're not involved in large corporations, they're just doing it themselves, for themselves and their community. So organic is already feeding the world and conventional never did.”

Healthy Planet

Buying from those small local farms and composting what you don’t eat also reduces your carbon footprint. It takes less fossil fuels to bring the food to market and you’re cutting down on food waste, which according to the EPA , is the most common material found in US landfills. In fact, every year Americans throw away 119 billion pounds of food– that’s 40 percent of all our food– food that off-gasses methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more impactful than CO2 in the near term.

Not to mention that when you save your zucchini from the landfill and compost it instead, that helps your local farmer grow more food which pulls carbon out of the atmosphere where it’s harmful, and puts it right back into the soil, where it’s actually needed. Did you know there is more carbon in the first three feet of soil, than all the atmospheric carbon combined? Nature is wise beyond her years.

Healthy YOU

If after all of this, YOU want to try your hand at growing your own food, hooray! If we are all able to grow just enough food to feed ourselves and a few neighbors, well then, problem solved.

Maybe you’re not ready to leave your career behind like Kegan did and head for the fields, but it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. As Kegan says:

“Anyone who devotes an intentional portion of their life to the production of food I would consider a farmer. If you're a backyard gardener growing for yourself, you're doing some amount of farming.”

If I can do it, you can do it. What started as a weedy strip of ground between a brick wall and some concrete turned into more food than I can even give away and tons of beauty too. I LOVE participating in nature’s miraculous cycle. Watching a bee turn a flower into a fruit is a spectacle to behold.

Whether you’re growing herbs in jars on your windowsill or planting a community garden, there are tons of resources available and as Kegan said, spreadsheets to help keep you on task :) In fact, Kegan is now available nationwide as a consultant for small farmers, so if you are ready to take the next step, reach out to Rodale Institute.

FIND YOUR FARMER

If you can’t grow your own food, don’t despair. There are almost 2 million farms in the US and around 80% are small farms! Find your nearest CSA or connect with your local farmer at localharvest.org .

Follow HOPE Is My Middle Name wherever you listen to podcasts for more inspiring stories of everyday Americans doing BIG daring things to make the world a little better. #HopeIsMyMiddleName

A Museum of Natural Wonders: Betty Reid Soskin

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 09:41:35 GMT

The National Park Service was established in 1916, and just five years later, Betty Reid Soskin was born. It would take 85 trailblazing years for this force of nature to arrive at her park, but when Betty was made an official ranger at Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park, she breathed life into it, restoring a wealth of shared American experience that might have otherwise been lost. She recalls visiting only three or four National Parks in her lifetime, including The Grand Canyon, which she refers to as “the grand dame and most beautiful of them all,” but her favorite is the one she suits up for in the morning, the one she calls home.

Betty came to the National Park Service as a field representative of the California State Assembly, consulting for Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park at a time when “it didn’t know what it was to be,” she told us in a video interview. “It had a very limited life, a kind of bumper sticker life — ‘we can do it.’ I was able to help it become what it wound up being.” If not for Betty, Rosie may have been reduced to a bumper sticker. Betty became foundational to getting the story straight. “So many people have lived my history, and so many people have lived your history, and the nation is bereft without those,” she tells park visitors in the documentary No Time to Waste. “What gets remembered depends on who’s in the room remembering.”

For Betty, this meant remembering that her participation in the civilian effort to build what President Franklin Roosevelt called “The Arsenal of Democracy” occurred alongside the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans and the fatal explosions at Port Chicago. As a ranger at Rosie the Riveter, Betty invites visitors to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. “Somebody put a uniform on the life that I was already living,” she explained. “I was active on the home front, but I had completely forgotten it after the war ended, and here was a second time to be able to relive those years. As I lived them, they became alive for me, and I began to be able to share that. There were so many stories that had been forgotten; I was able to bring them back to life. That was something that I hadn’t expected, nor did the people. They were able to relive the stories through me, and that was an exceptional kind of thing to happen.”

After 14 years, she still finds her job to be exceptional, and when asked about her favorite part of it, she doesn’t miss a beat: “It’s the people,” the people whom she lovingly and jokingly refers to as “her public.” This reference is not at all inaccurate. Over the years, Betty has become a national treasure, a living legend in her own right. She’s given countless interviews to major media outlets, authored the acclaimed Sign My Name to Freedom: A Memoir of a Pioneering Life, and in addition to the aforementioned documentary, a new film on her life is slated for 2021.

“As I warmed up to being a ranger, my role with people began to consume my life. I was suddenly someone that I wasn’t sure I had known. Finding myself getting deeper and deeper into that ranger person began to be the payoff for me.”

There is a light in her eyes as she says, “Reliving a period of my life that I could not have known that I was going to live through was a gift that I don’t think I could have anticipated. But it turned out to be one of the most important things that I’ve ever been able to do.” She smiles: “I don’t know whether the government knows that it’s doing that when it’s happening.”

While we didn’t conduct a proper survey, it would seem that the National Park Service does hope to create such experiences. Megan Springate, who works at the National Park Service (NPS) Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education in Washington, D.C., writes on nationalparks.org:

“There are parks across the country that preserve and celebrate incredible landscapes and the plants and animals that live there. And there are parks across the country that preserve and commemorate pieces of our national history that could otherwise vanish… With over 400 sites and programs that reach into every county across the country, we have a responsibility to do good history.”

Betty is integral to fulfilling that responsibility and has received widespread recognition for her service, perhaps most notably by President Barack Obama who presented her with a commemorative presidential coin.

She glowingly recounts the story. Imagine, “meeting the president and his wife and introducing him to the nation on television, knowing that we were standing on the stage, within sight of a slave-built capital. I have a picture of my great-grandmother [who was born into slavery] in my breast pocket, and I’m speaking to the person who is now the president of the United States, for the first time. And the wonder of that washes over me constantly. I have to remind myself that I’m really Betty.”

Being Betty, wonder is a theme. When asked what makes her feel alive, she looks up, searching for the words. “Oh, there’s so much.” But it hasn’t all been wondrous. “My life was mixed with beauty, with sadness, with struggle, with more things than anyone needs to have.” She recalls a period in the 1950s when she and her husband Mel Reid were living in a wealthy Oakland suburb, a suburb full of white people trying to prevent people who looked like Betty from moving into their neighborhood. “I was living a life of rejection. I began to be able to process all of that by writing music. My husband had given me a guitar. I had taught myself to play. Now, when I go back and sing those songs, they are so much a part of life as I knew it then.”

It’s as if the songs are artifacts in the living breathing museum of natural wonder that is Betty Reid Soskin. “They are so much me, that I wonder what there is that allows us to find what we need to find within ourselves. Because I found it. I didn’t ever accomplish anything out of what I did with music. I didn’t ever copyright anything, or publish anything. I buried them in the back of a closet in an old shoebox, and only recently have they been rediscovered. Now they’re becoming the soundtrack for a film, and I’m finding them beautiful. I sang one of them with the Oakland Symphony recently. It was astounding. I was able to sing a song written way back. And it held up.”

When asked if she’s inclined to write more songs, she says, “No, that seems to have been a time when it was for me to do. I wrote them without expecting anything and it seems now, that they were written as a way to take care of my daughter, who is mentally retarded, after I’m gone. So, there is time. Now it seems that nothing is accidental. Everything has been timely. It’s all playing out accordingly. And I love that.”

Betty had four children. However, she finds it remarkable that her children don’t factor into her persona as a ranger, as she spent her time on the home front of the war before they were born and returned to tell the story well after they had grown.

She marvels at how such a huge part of her experience could remain unexplored. But with Betty, there’s still so much to discover, 99 years of bearing witness to incredible upheaval and transformation, a transformation that Betty finds to be in full effect today.

She offers words of wisdom for young people who are now witnessing what history might forget. “The need to record everything is so great. So many of us are moving through life so fast that we don’t really find the time. And it is not only the large things. It’s the many small things that make up the large things that become so important. It’s the smaller things in life that I now find so much in.”

She’s absolutely vibrant. “I came to terms with life when I realized that I was not going to ever be able to answer all the questions that I had. That it was the questions that I was going to die with. That I don’t know. And that maybe that’s the secret, maybe it’s not knowing. Maybe it’s that, that throws me into the future. And I love that. I’m not only satisfied with it, but it really seems to be the answer — that there is no answer. That we each are given a period of life to live, and that we live it. In the collective wisdom of all of us, as we are going through that life that has meaning, that that’s what is.”

If she had one word, it would be “why,” she tells us. “It’s important that the questions remain alive in everybody. We have to remember that we can’t know. That it’s a seeking; it’s trying to find out. It’s dying without knowing that keeps one alive. I think that that is what has kept me alive. I think my children will find it keeps them alive.”

In Betty Reid Soskin, we see that our National Parks are not only about preserving natural resources but about honoring the stories of our people, and the land that bears witness. We go to our National Parks to get lost in nature and to find ourselves, to remember where we came from and who we truly are. And as Betty reminds us, to live the questions that keep us alive.

This article originally appeared in Garden & Health.

Restoring Native Culture with Regenerative Tourism in Alaska

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 09:44:57 GMT

In the age of TikTok and Instagram, it seems there’s no place we haven’t seen, but if you’ve ever been to Alaska, you know there’s a whole lotta world left to discover — a world on the forefront of climate change, the energy transition, advocacy for Native rights, and — regenerative tourism. Because amid the challenges Alaskans are navigating, including transportation, supply chain, and food security, they’re seeing unprecedented numbers of tourists.

Cruise ships cause the islanded town of Sitka to swell from under 9,000 to nearly half a million people in the summertime. These ships bring opportunities, and they also bring complications for the people who live there, and for the environment. As a regenerative tourism catalyst, Mary Goddard relies on Alaska Native values of sustainability and hospitality to help build a healthy relationship between her community and tourists who visit. Mary tells us:

“When you talk about regenerative tourism, it's always based on indigenous knowledge and wisdom, and you can see that across the world. Where you're from, you are an ambassador for your place. You see yourself as a steward of the land and the ocean and the culture and your community.”

Mary is a member of the Tlingit tribe. She's a mother, an artist, an entrepreneur, a filmmaker, an all-around force of nature. When you talk with Mary, you can't help but feel the wonder and sense the beauty of the world she inhabits, that we all inhabit — from the wilds of Alaska to the hills of Tennessee, wherever you find yourself.

Mary Goddard’s food blog is ForestFreshAlaska , and you can find her artwork at AlaskaMary.com If you want to visit Sitka, Mary recommends you stay at CampStarlightAlaska . And if you’re a veteran or first responder, Mary and her husband invite you to reconnect with nature at Waypoint for Veterans .

Links that Mary references in the episode include AIANTA (American Indian Alaska Native Tourism Association), Spruce Root, Sustainable Southeast Partnership , and Sealaska.

I first got to connect with Mary through filming the American Innovators episode, The Alaskan Island Running (almost) Entirely on Renewable Energy in Sitka. Watch it and subscribe for more Made In America Alaska episodes at YouTube.com/ConsensusDigitalMedia

How I Got Hope as My Middle Name According to My Dad

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 08:59:24 GMT

We recently released the new podcast called Hope Is My Middle Name , where I get to interview people doing big daring things to make the world better, people who give me reasons to hope. Hope is something I’ve been thinking about for as long as I can remember, partly because Hope is my middle name.

So before we launched the podcast, I called my dad to ask him how I came to have that name, hoping to understand a little more about this lifelong quest for hope.

Here's My Dad

“Your coming was a profound change for your mom and me. She had miscarried and we decided then we weren’t even going to consider having children for a few years, because we wanted to be more prepared.

Once we realized that your mom was with child, this whole part of me that I never even knew existed just started to blossom and grow, and that was the concept of fatherhood. What was happening in my heart was, there was a huge sense of hope. Your coming, your arrival, hoping for that.

You know, when looked at from a certain perspective, hope could be more important than any word in all of language. I think hope can almost be as important as the word love, because we have to have hope. You may be in a place in your life where you’re not really feeling a lot of love, but boy, to have hope is huge.

Remember in The Lord of the Rings after Gandalf was caught by the Balrogs and pulled down into the flaming abyss? When the hobbits ended up outside of that cave with Strider the ranger, also known as Aragorn, they were crying and one of them said, ‘We have no hope. Now we have no hope without Gandalf,’ and Aragorn said, ‘Well, we’ll just have to go on without hope.’

My Dad on Hope

I remember reading that, as a 17-year old, and thinking how hard that would be to go on without hope, what a drudgery that could be. So, between 17 and 25, when you were born, the whole concept of hope was very big to me, and I couldn’t imagine a better middle name.

You were changing the whole dynamic of us as a couple. You were changing the paradigm of our world to become a mother and a father, to be parents and to be blessed enough to bring you into the world. Scripture says the fruit of the womb, being you, the very first one, is God’s reward to a couple and you were a reward to us. So your middle name needed to be as profound as a middle name could be.

[My dad then explains how silly he thought it would be to name me Katy Love. So it would have to be Hope.]

In First Corinthians 13 Paul said, ‘and now abide these three, faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love,’ Okay, that is because God is love, but he is also the God of all hope. I think hope is, because of the darkness of the planet, on a par with love. If you’re not looking at the Godhead, hope is just as important as love on this planet and so therefore, since it [your name] couldn’t be love it needed to be hope.

And it was hope with a whole lot of joy and gladness because I couldn’t think of a better name, a better middle name. I felt like that became the overarching sense of who we would be as a couple, and as a family. Our first born would have for her middle name, hope, and that would matter for all of us going forward.”

The People Who First Gave Us Hope

I’ve certainly struggled with hope over the years, but I’ve never lost it. I am grateful for the love my parents held for me even before I arrived on the planet. This love gave me hope, quite literally.

We all have unique relationships with our parents and family; we don’t all have stories of hope when it comes to where we come from. But, there is a deeper love at work, the love that called you into existence with chances so slim, the odds stack up to 2 million people playing with a trillion-sided die and each of them rolling the exact same number. How’s that for some hope?

This week, as we head into Father’s Day, let’s reach out to those dads, mentors, teachers, friends who have shown us love from the beginning. And if we didn’t get love in the beginning, let’s remember those who first gave us a reason to hope.

Farming and Community Help Heal A Local Vet

Thu, 17 Jun 2021 08:48:02 GMT

On a gentle hill on the outskirts of Bristol, Vermont there lies ten acres of rich farmland, rolling fields of perfectly plotted perennials– trees, nuts and berries — mushrooms to fertilize the orchards, chickens paying their rent in eggs, and goats to cut the grass. Rows of saplings line the perimeter, smartly controlling soil health and erosion. From oaks to elderberries, each tree has a specific purpose, whether for food, windbreak, firewood or forage. Every element of the farm is mission-driven and artfully engineered by an equally complex and vibrant ecosystem within the mind of Jon Turner.

Retired U.S. Marine, Iraq War veteran, young father and now homesteading farmer, Turner, with his wife Cathy, started Wild Roots Farm five years ago with the goal of healing himself from the scars of a war-torn service, along with other veterans who would make a pilgrimage to the farm, and ultimately, the land, through the practice of sustainable agriculture. Wild Roots Farm now produces enough food for the Turner family, with plenty extra to give back to the community.

If 15 years ago, you had told Jon Turner he’d be farming the land and leading hundreds of students, veterans and community members in the same life-giving practices, he wouldn’t have believed you. Between 2004 and 2007, Turner served three tours, one in Haiti and two in Iraq. On his final deployment to Ramadi, he nearly died when a mortar blast sent shrapnel into his jaw, narrowly avoiding his carotid artery. Suffering a traumatic brain injury, he returned home with severe PTSD.

In an effort to reconnect with himself, Turner began writing and publishing poetry, joining Warrior Writers and the Combat Paper Project. Still, the transition to civilian life proved exceedingly difficult until he sunk his feet into the dirt. Through gardening, Turner found a sense of purpose and peace of mind that he’d been seeking to no avail in alcohol, drugs and other destructive outlets. He began to study permaculture, sustainable design, natural building and woodworking, and after ten years of digging around in the dirt, Turner is living, breathing proof of healthy soil’s ability to contribute to our well-being in a visceral way. Bacteria in the soil gets into our pores, triggering a release of serotonin, and for Turner, this not only sobered him up, but gave him a new mission.

Unfortunately, this has not been the case for many of Turner’s brothers in arms. Over the years, he’s lost several military buddies to suicide, the hidden casualty of war. In 2016, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs found that veterans ages 18 to 29 are six times more likely than their civilian counterparts to commit suicide. Turner says, “A lot of the reason vets take their own life is that they don’t have a sense of service anymore. When you’re at war, you know what you’re doing. Man or woman, whatever your job was, everything was mission-oriented.” With Wild Roots Farm, Turner is creating an educational landscape where veterans can learn not only to grow food, but to reintegrate into civilian life through farming. “In a sense you’re kind of nurturing yourself, you’re more capable of healing wounds that might have gone unseen.”

Nowadays, Turner is including youth in his outreach, hosting workshops, retreats on organic gardening, permaculture and small-scale diversified farming for schoolchildren and college students. Turner’s gospel is one of sustainability, founded on the firm belief that this type of farming is possible on a larger scale — despite what we may have been told, industrial agriculture is not the only option for feeding a growing world population. As the climate shifts, we will need farming techniques based on an ecosystem of resilience, practices that treat the land more gently and depend less on fossil fuels. In the words of a war veteran turned farmer, we find abundant food for thought and solid ground for healing.

This article originally appeared in Garden & Health .

March Forth: Brittany Comins Hikes Her Way to Healing

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 09:18:16 GMT

Brittany and Brian spent one sweet and loving year of marriage before Brian suffered a heart-attack and left Brittany a widow at age 28. It was an unimaginable loss. Brian had been healthy, active and full of life, the thought of a fatal undiagnosed condition seemed impossible. Last year, Brittany bravely documented her journey through grief to a deeper sense of faith as she did what she and Brian loved to do together — she went hiking. And she really went for it. She quit her job and set out alone on the Appalachian Trail. In a two-part conversation, Brittany shares her experience hiking through the valley of the shadow of death.

Part I

How did you make the decision to hike the Appalachian Trail?

I had wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail for a long time. In fact, right after I got married, I tried to talk my husband into doing it for our honeymoon, but his voice of reason said the bills needed to be paid.

Then, a year after we got married, he passed away. I dove into work, immersing myself in it until I reached a tipping point and realized I needed to take a different approach.

I left for the Appalachian Train on what would have been on Brian’s 40th birthday, March 4th. I thought to myself, this is the perfect way to “march forth” in my own life. So that’s what I did, I started walking north.

Four and a half months, 2000 miles, that’s one incredible adventure that you hiked primarily on your own. How did you do it?

I hiked solo, but people do it different ways. Some people meet up with others and they form what is called a trail family and they might hike together for a long period of time, or maybe the whole trail. For the previous few years, I had been following the direction of others, what others expected me to do, and I needed the freedom to follow what my heart was telling me to do. I met some incredible people and a lot of us hiked at the same speed, so we crossed each other’s paths. We got to know each other really well and we still stay in touch today.

But at the end of the day, I set out every morning with my own agenda.

The common saying on the trail is “Hike your own hike.” Everyone makes fun of it at some point, but it’s so true. We get so focused on pressures that are coming in and what other people’s miles look like, or what other people’s trials and tribulations are. At the end of the day, we were out there to hike our own hike and take the path that was going to work for our journey.

How did it feel being out in the vast, wide open all alone?

In some ways, it’s so much easier than just being out in the world, because everything on the trail is fixable, because it has to be. If something happened to my tent, I had to fix it, or I’d be cold and wet that night, and that’s not really an option. If my food got messed up, I had to fix it. The priorities in my life became elevated. As long as I had food, water and shelter, I was good. My needs were met. Everything else was just the cherry on top.

I thought about that so much after I got off trail. What if I just focus on the bare bones things that I need to survive in this world? Then everything else just seems like more of a blessing. And it also made it a lot less intimidating to be out there solo. When I was walking out there alone, there were a lot of things that could have gone wrong. Everything from physically to emotionally to mentally to… just go down the list. But when I was focusing every day on maintaining my bare necessities and being satisfied as long as I had food, water and shelter, it was a much easier challenge.

Is that something that you come back to regularly? How often do you think about the trail and what you experienced out there?

Every single day.

How does it influence your life now?

I moved from a four bedroom house into a one bedroom apartment. I sometimes still feel like one bedroom is too big. It shifted my focus from being so concentrated on work and putting myself in a good position for the future and all that stuff. When I let the idea of controlling the future go, then I had all this freedom to explore. I had the freedom to do what really brings me joy, which is getting outside. Now I don’t have to spend my weekends mowing the lawn. I can spend them out hiking.

It was a huge life transformation for me to be okay with less. There’s so much satisfaction that comes with that because it’s so easy to get wrapped up in material stuff. I was reading a book about hoarders and it explained that hoarders don’t necessarily just love stuff. It’s that every piece is tied to a memory and that’s how some people’s memories are triggered.

My memories aren’t triggered by material things and I struggled with that after Brian passed away. Sometimes his family wanted to hold onto physical pieces of him, and to me it was about memories and experiences and photographs, rather than his old high school jersey or a shirt he wore. As soon as I started to understand that about myself — that I was okay breaking away from some of those things, letting go of them — it was a much more powerful frame of mind.

That makes me think of Cheryl Strayed in Wild when she’s trying to set out on the trail and she can’t lift her backpack, so she ends up leaving most everything in the hotel room.

Exactly. It’s funny because I relate to that so much. I started and thought I needed so much stuff. I had a bowl for my food, but after carrying my pack for a while I realized, I can eat straight out of the pot. I don’t need all this extra weight! I started breaking it down to the essentials.

My pack started at about 40 pounds, and now I can carry 10 days worth of food at 28 pounds. I learned what I actually needed and what was just a luxury. As soon as I really just pared it down to only what was needed, I could go farther and really get to some cool places. It’s kind of a cool thing to think about in life too– what if you really just strip out all that extra stuff? Where can you go?

I love that. How did your faith impact the hike and how did the hike impact your faith?

I would do the Appalachian Trail a million times over. I would do it every year if I could, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t parts of the experience that were just really hard. It’s hard to describe how much my feet hurt. It took almost a month after getting off trail before I could stand up out of bed, and I would have to hold on to the edge of the bed and try to walk.

There’s a verse in 1 Thessalonians that says we’re called to be grateful in all things and I applied that to the trail, but also in grief I’ve taken that up as a kind of calling, if you will. God never asked us to be grateful for everything that happens. I never have to be grateful for the fact that I lost my husband at 28 years old. I didn’t have to be grateful that my feet hurt every day. God never called us to be grateful for those things. He asked us to be grateful in all circumstances. While I can’t be grateful for the fact that I lost my husband, I can be really grateful for the things that he gave me. As soon as I started turning my attitude towards that of gratitude, the whole world shifted for me.

I found gratitude in the fact that grief gave me boldness. I don’t know that I would have hiked the Appalachian Trail had I not realized that at 36 years old, like Brian, you could have a heart attack when you’re otherwise healthy. Life changes in an instant — middle-age can’t be 36, retirement can’t be when you wait to do the things that you’ve been dreaming of your whole life, because you don’t know if something could happen when you’re 36. Or if at 58, you get rheumatoid arthritis and all of a sudden, all that stuff is taken off the table. Those are things that we have to grasp onto now. And that’s a new reality that I am extremely grateful for.

Was there a specific epiphany moment for you on the trail?

One of the moments that really hit me was in the Great Smoky Mountains, near the beginning of the trail, down in Tennessee. There’s this peak called Charlies Bunion. Brian and I had hiked it years ago, and we had a perfect day for it. We climbed up to the top and got to this little knob and could see the world. We could see the entire world. It’s like sitting on top of it. It’s gorgeous. It’s perfect.

I’d been looking forward to this view for the first 200 miles of trail. And I camped two miles from it so that I could get up right away and see it at sunrise. I planned my mileage for weeks. I set up my tent that night thinking “this is going to be great, I get to see Charlies Bunion. Tomorrow it’s going to be emotional because I miss that Brian wasn’t there to see it, but this is gonna be great.” I woke up and it was a blizzard. I mean, a complete blizzard. I couldn’t see 10 feet in front of me. There were six inches of snow on the ground. I couldn’t see anything.

As they say, I had to keep hiking on, so I packed up everything thinking maybe it would clear up by the time that I got there. I arrived at Charlie’s Bunion and could hardly even see the edge of the cliff. I was emotionally devastated. I asked God, ‘Why can’t you just give me this one thing? This is what I have been looking forward to for so long. Why? Why do you have to make all of this harder?’

I was alone, and the world was quiet. When snow is laying on the ground it insulates all noise. Animals aren’t out and there’s a beautiful silence after a blizzard like that. I hiked out of Charlie’s Bunion and I kept thinking about missing that view. All of a sudden the storm started to clear and the clouds were barely parting, and I could see the outline of the snow covered trees. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. And I thought you know what? Nobody else has this view. Because who in their right mind would go out into the middle of a blizzard?

Then it popped into my head, oh, I get it. This is what God means. I don’t have to be grateful for all of this. But I can find gratitude in the fact that I got that view. I carried that with me the whole trail. Once the snow went away, it started raining and when you can’t go inside to dry off, you’re just constantly soaking wet. I hated that rain, but nobody else got to see how bright the leaves were when it’s raining outside. I wouldn’t have otherwise gotten to see what happened when the rain dries up that next morning. I woke up and saw the edges of the evergreen leaves were bright green because they grew overnight from the rain. That growth, it’s just absolutely amazing. That was one of the big spiritual lessons that I took with me.

One of the other verses that always stuck out to me is Hebrews 12:1, where we’re asked to run the race before us with endurance. A lot of people will put that verse on their mirror or on t-shirts. I have a shirt that I run in and I wore a bracelet that said it too. But then I started picking up on a really key part of that phrase, which is, we’re not just asked to run with endurance, we’re asked to run the race set out before us with endurance, right? We don’t necessarily know what that path is gonna be. We’re just asked to keep running through it. It was a really important moment for me to see we don’t necessarily determine the path. God determines that path. He gives us the tools to make sure we can get through it.

And in Northern Virginia, when I was getting really tired and was 1000 miles into the trail, it was a great reminder that endurance is not for no sake. There’s a purpose to this. There’s a northern end that we’re going to and we can apply that to our faith journey. Mount Katahdin is that sense of eternal life. God put us on the path that heads north, heads towards that eternal place. We don’t get to determine what that path looks like. We’re just called to be on it and push through it and bring as many people as we can along on that journey.

Part II

I learned that a forester started the Appalachian Trail and he hadn’t conceived that it would be for recreational hiking, it was meant to be a connector trail for cities to farms. He came up with the plan while grieving the death of his wife.

I didn’t know that. There are so many people on the trail grieving in a lot of different ways. There are certainly people out there who are grieving because they lost spouses. I hiked with a woman who had just lost her husband. We all get trail names out there and her trail name was Dash. She had this story — your headstone marks your birth date and your death date, and you really live in the dash, that’s how she got her name. I hiked with another man who had lost his wife just six weeks before leaving for the Appalachian Trail. This was really a healing time and we were all at different stages in our grief and we could talk about it. Sometimes it’s hard to find people who can connect on something like that, particularly at our age. People don’t lose their spouses in their 20s and they aren’t still dealing with it in their 30s.

All of a sudden, I was in an environment where a lot of people were carrying grief. Some people lost children. Some people were grieving their careers. They had just entered retirement, and were in a whole new life, their children left home and they were grieving the fact that they don’t have young kids at home anymore. We often apply grief to death. But grief happens to all of us in a lot of different ways. A lot of people on the trail were veterans and some of them were grieving for their friends, but a lot of them were grieving the fact that they lost the lifestyle, the sense of community they had in the military.

I met people and went deep with them into these topics right away. It wasn’t something that people skirted around. It was so refreshing, because people said, ‘Listen, my life is messed up. This is why I’m out here.’ That’s how we were introduced and I realized a lot of people’s lives were messed up, it wasn’t only mine.

What a beautiful, elemental way to work through the grieving process.

It was really refreshing. I think people find solace in nature because of the utility of it. Sometimes a stream didn’t have a very strong current and so I needed to create my own spout to fill the water bottle. We would take rhododendron leaves, which are long and pretty sturdy. We would create a spout with leaves, because that’s what we had access to. That was easiest for us to grab, to take all the chaos that’s happening in the water and bring it down into one place.

When chaos happens in our lives, what’s on that lowest shelf, what do we make easiest for us to grab? That was another realization I had out there. We don’t have control over what chaos comes into our lives. But when we’re falling down, we do have control over what we have pre-decided to put on our lowest shelf. I’ve thought a lot about that since coming off trail, what am I putting on that lower shelf?

There might be multiple things on that shelf, but if faith isn’t part of it, it’s easy to skip over when bad things happen. I was fortunate that when my husband died, I had a very strong Christian community around me. My pastor was at my house every single day for months, making sure that faith was on that lower shelf so that as I was struggling I could always grab onto my faith.

There were a lot of questions that came up all of a sudden again. I had grown up Christian. I had always believed, but it hadn’t been real. It had been this beautiful story of how Jesus died and rose for us. Then all of a sudden, I was faced with the very real tangible question — do I believe that my husband who I loved very, very much is truly in heaven and what does that look like and what do I think that is? Because I wanted to know where he was. We all want to know where our loved ones are, whether they’re here or not. All of a sudden I was faced with the question of how much should I really believe all this stuff? Do I believe enough where I can sleep at night knowing that he is in heaven? And that was a real question for me and something that I had to face head on.

Once again, being grateful in all circumstances, I’m very grateful that I had that community around me that made sure that faith, as I was grasping for those answers, was on that lowest shelf. I tried to make sure that when I came back, I set up my life in a way where faith was there. I got an apartment that was closer to my church so there were no excuses on Sunday morning about sleeping in, even small changes like that. I’m keeping my Bible out, rather than putting it away every day. It’s a reminder, it’s sitting on my coffee table.

It’s striking how on the trail and throughout incredible loss, you’re getting up and walking every day. You didn’t stay frozen in the blizzard, you walked through it. Your story makes me think of Micah 6:8 ‘What does the Lord require of you, to act justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.’ Your willingness to walk the path is inspiring especially right now when the world feels very uncertain. What would you say to someone who is struggling with grief and uncertainty?

There’s a saying on the trail: ‘the trail is going to provide’ and it happens so much, I saw it in very tangible ways. My fourth night on trail it was seven degrees, and I was sleeping outside right on the ground. I can’t describe how cold it was. I was thinking ‘I hope I make it through tonight.’ The cold dries out the skin, my lips were so chapped they were bleeding. I got to a road crossing and a random man pulled over. He asked me if I’m hiking the trail and if I need food or anything. Then he gave me his brand new stick of chapstick. We call it ‘trail magic,’ the trail provides. It would happen like that all the time. People would say, ‘I’m so thirsty,” and turn a corner and some ‘trail angel’ had left out gallon bottles of water. How did that happen? But God does that exact same thing.

When we come to Him, when we ask Him for help, perhaps He knew before we were even going to ask and He had already sown those seeds to deliver us comfort or provide for us in our time of need. To give us that chapstick. God provides, just as so many of those times the trail provided what we needed. It comes down to the question — what do we actually need in life? Jesus talks about it a lot, about us focusing on the wrong things. If we really just focused on what we need in our lives, which at the foundation is faith, but let’s not kid ourselves, we all need food, water, shelter, too, right? God has promised to provide for us. So even in the times of trial, when we don’t really know how it’s going to move from one day to the next, that’s when that faith comes out.

So many times when hard times come we shell up. We don’t want people to know we’re struggling and we put up walls, we put up guards. That cuts off some of the tools that God made to deliver comfort and help to us. I think the more that we can be open, the more that we can put out that we’re struggling and try not to hide from it so much, accept when people talk and share their own struggles, the more we can reach out and be the messengers that we’re supposed to be.

God is such a relational being. He built relationships quite fundamentally. And yet we shut them down all the time, as humans. God was the one who founded our relationships, and our interactions with Him are based on a relationship. He created direct communication through prayer as the fundamental way that we can communicate with Him. And then the first thing that we often do when we’re going through a hard time, this is me speaking for me, is to cut off that line of communication, whether it’s to God or to other people. I cut that off. I shell up. I’m a tough lady right? I can do this, we’re gonna get through it. I’m going to find my own way. But God just sent three ships full of supplies and you turned them all down because you wanted to be strong enough to do it on your own?

We have to lean on the belief that God foresaw this. There are so many indications of that in the Bible where God says, ‘Hey, listen, I gave you all these hints. I set up all of these ways that I could speak to you. Why are you so surprised when I speak to you?’ I think about that a lot when I’m going through hard times. God knew every hair on our head before we were even born and He has put tools in our lives to give us comfort, to help heal us.