Come join me at a Community Gathering

Ron Paul supporters are welcome to bring materials to promote Ron Paul, just as anyone else is welcome to bring materials to share what they are interested in promoting. And, feel free to talk to people about Ron Paul--this atmosphere will be one where conversations are encouraged. Check out the description--and if you are local I hope you can come. If not, perhaps you might like to duplicate this activity in your neighborhood or home town. Let me know how it turns out!

The Community Gathering

We are gathering to deepen our sense of community in our neighborhoods and our world. Everyone is invited.

Friday, Oct. 5, 6-10PM
Walker Park, Fayetteville, large gazebo near S. College
Potluck dinner. Please bring your own dishes and utensils. If you don’t have food to share, come anyway! Do you best to share what you have.

 Do you need work? Let’s network!

 Do you have goals and ideas that you want to share with others? Let’s share ideas and resources!

 Do you want to make new friends and deepen old friendships? Let’s share an evening together!

You are welcome to bring:
 networking materials to promote your business, or other topics you enthusiastically support
 musical instruments and games,
 things to give away like seeds, clothes, household items.
 your ideas for topics to discuss—we will have fun ways to help people find similar minded people.
 anything else that you think will inspire connection and fun.

Please invite anyone you like to attend, especially already existing groups that have similar values and goals, and also people in the Walker Park neighborhood

If you have any ideas to share, or would like help in sponsoring a Community Gathering in your neighborhood, please contact Patricia Mikkelson, founder and director of the Livable Future Project.

Sponsored by Livable Future Project, helping neighborhoods become thriving, self-reliant communities

For more information: Patricia Mikkelson community_gathering@yahoo.com
Learn more about the larger vision at http://www.communitygathering.blogspot.com

Ron Paul : When in the course of human events...

All you Ron Paul supporters out there--this is important to share with your friends. And, it might just inspire you to start a Community Gathering in your neighborhood so that the spirit of community and connection that you will see mostly at the end can happen even more! Who knows, maybe Ron Paul will get on board and help promote Community Gatherings. If anyone has any ideas on how to get his attention, I'd like to hear about your ideas.

Ron Paul and Bill O'Reilly Duke It Out (09/10/07)

This is an example of just the opposite of what will take place at Community Gatherings. People will be encouraged to dialogue about their differences, and find understanding. Of course, we can't force people to do this, but we sure can create an environment which is conducive. Bill, you sure could benefit from some lessons about non-violent communication!

The Chairman of the Board supports Ron Paul! ~

At Community Gatherings, music will be a very important part of the events, including sing alongs, open mic, jam sessions, and even worship (only for those who wish to partake) Because ideally there will be various rooms for activities to take place, music will be away from the conversations so that people can feel more free to participate.

This song might well be one that a Ron Paul supporter might sing at an open mic. Check it out! It is great!

Growing Food in support of Ron Paul's values

This website looks to me like one of the best resources out there about how we can grow more food so we can be more self-reliant and exemplify the values that Ron Paul and his supporters stand for.

EDIBLE ESTATES

Edible Estates is an attack on the American front lawn and everything it has come to represent.

Edible Estates reconciles issues of global food production and urbanized land use with the modest gesture of a domestic garden.

Edible Estates is an ongoing series of projects to replace the American front lawn with edible garden landscapes responsive to culture, climate, context and people.

Edible Estates is a practical food producing initiative, a place-responsive landscape design proposal, a scientific horticultural experiment, a conceptual land-art project, a defiant political statement, a community out-reach program and an act of radical gardening.

Our Lawn
Why do we dedicate so much land to a space with so little function that requires the consumption of so many precious resources and endless hours of maintenance while contaminating our air and water?

The American front lawn is almost entirely a symbolic gesture. Exactly what it represents has shifted from its ancestry in English estates to today's endless suburban carpet of conformity. Originally manicured by grazing animals, an ornamental sweeping lawn would occupy otherwise valuable farmland surrounding a manor estate, demonstrating the owner's wealth while keeping the production of his vegetable garden out of view. In this tradition, today's American lawn has become the default surface for any defensible private space. An occasional lawn for recreation can be a delight, but most lawns are only occupied when they are being tended.

The lawn devours resources while it pollutes. It is maniacally groomed with mowers and trimmers powered by the 2 stroke motors responsible for much of our greenhouse gas emissions. Hydrocarbons from mowers react with nitrogen oxides in the presence of sunlight to produce ozone. To eradicate invading plants it is drugged with pesticides which are then washed into our water supply with sprinklers and hoses dumping our increasingly rare fresh drinking resource down the gutter. Of the 30 commonly used lawn pesticides, 17 are detected in groundwater and 23 have the ability to leach into groundwater sources. The lawn divides and isolates us. It is the buffer of anti-social no-mans-land that we wrap ourselves with, reinforcing the suburban alienation of our sprawling communities. The mono-culture of one plant species covering our neighborhoods from coast to coast celebrates puritanical homogeneity and mindless conformity. Lawns cover 30 million acres of the United States while 349 million acres are used for crops.

Our Food
Meanwhile at the grocery store we confront our food. Engineered fruits and vegetables wrapped in plastic and styrofoam, cultivated not for taste, but for ease of transport, appearance and uniformity, then sprayed with chemicals to inhibit diseases and pests that thrive in an unbalanced ecosystem. Organic farming accounts for less than 1% of the United States agriculture output. The produce in the average American dinner is trucked 1,500 miles to get to the plate. We don't know where our fruits and vegetables came from or who grew it. Perhaps we have even forgotten that plants were responsible for this mass-produced product we are consuming.

This detachment from the source of our food breeds a careless attitude towards our role as custodians of the land that feeds us. Perhaps we would reconsider what we put down the drain, on the ground and in the air if there was more direct evidence that we will ultimately ingest it.

The Edible Estates Initiative
Edible Estates proposes the replacement of the American lawn with a highly productive domestic edible landscape. Food grown in our front yards will connect us to the seasons, the organic cycles of the earth and our neighbors. The banal lifeless space of uniform grass in front of the house will be replaced with the chaotic abundance of bio-diversity. In becoming gardeners we will reconsider our connection to the land, what we take from it and what we put in it. Each yard will be a unique expression of its location and of the inhabitant and their desires. Valuable land will be put to work.

The Edible Estates project will be implemented in 9 cities in the United States over the next 3 years. An adventurous family in each town will offer their typical suburban front lawn as a working prototype for the region. They will dare to defy the sweeping continuity of their neighborhood's green lined streets. Working together with the family and additional helpers the front lawn will be removed and replaced with an edible landscape. This highly productive garden will be designed to respond to the unique characteristics of the site, the needs and desires of the owner, the community and its history and especially the local climate and geography.

Each of the 9 regional prototype gardens will be sponsored by a local art institution and developed in partnership with a horticultural or agricultural research organization. Each garden will be planted in the spring and the first season's growth will be documented and displayed as a public exhibition.

A booklet will be produced specifically for each town and distributed for free. It will communicate to residents how they may go about replacing their lawn with an Edible Estate. The booklet will include listings of local nurseries, fruits and vegetables that are recommended for the region, native plants that are edible, local businesses that may assist with the labor and maintenance, basic gardening principals and further reading resources. This information will be assembled with the help of local specialists and also be available on the internet.

With the modest gesture of reconsidering the use of our small individual private yards, Edible Estates takes on our relationship with our neighbors, the source of our food and our connection to the natural environment.

GARDENLAB

The Edible Estates project is part of the Gardenlab program, established by Fritz Haeg in 2001. With the garden as a metaphor and actual laboratory, it supports ecology based initiatives in art and design. Past projects have included the creation of a community garden and memorial lawn on the Pasadena campus of Art Center College of Design. In fall 2004 'the gardenLAb experiment', a vast convention / fair / exhibition / happening about the ecology of Los Angeles brought together the work of Los Angeles based artists, designers, scientists, filmmakers and activists. It was staged in the Art Center College of Design exhibition hall, 'The Wind Tunnel'. In summer 2005 the Edible Estates initiative to replace American front lawns with edible landscapes was initiated in the geographic center of the country, Salina, Kansas. This first of nine planned regional prototypes was sponsored by the Salina Art Center. The next edition will be established in Los Angeles in spring 2006 and followed by an exhibition in the fall. In winter 2006 Gardenlab established a permanent student run community garden on the campus of CalArts in Valencia, California. The Gardenlab program was initially funded by an Art Center faculty enrichment grant, and has since received significant support from various sources including the Durfee Foundation, Armstrong Garden Centers, Ford Motor Company, the City of Pasadena, the LEF Foundation and the Wallis Foundation.

Victory Gardens for Ron Paul

I realized today that I wanted to share some concrete things that people could do in their neighborhoods to simultaneously support Ron Paul and enrich their neighborhood. Although my focus is on the Community Gathering as that vehicle, I want to share some ideas that I hope will benefit. After I wrote this blog, I found out some other folks were on the same wavelength--I hope you will check out this website www.edibleestates.org It has excellent suggestions on how to transform your front lawn into a garden

One idea is that of a Victory Garden. What if people started digging up their front lawns and planted vegetable gardens. Or, in place of some of the flowers and shrubs, edible plants such as strawberries or blueberries were planted. Ron Paul signs reflecting the values he promotes--such as people not needing to rely on the government for everything--could be put up. The Victory Gardens would be a symbol that we want to grow locally, and shop locally--not be dependent on big companies or food stamps for our food.

I've heard it said that growing food is one of the most revolutionary thing we can do. I would add that this can help with the Ron Paul Revolution. I think this is true because of the following:

1. Growing our own food helps us to save money so we aren't so dependent on the money system. We can work less for others, and more on projects like supporting Ron Paul.

2. Growing a garden in your front yard will attract interest. Can you imagine your neighbors asking about what you are doing as you are digging up your front lawn, with your unique sign about supporting Ron Paul. And you telling them about Ron Paul and the value of growing your own food.

3. Exercise and being outdoors working in your garden will give you even more energy to work for the Ron Paul campaign. If you work barefoot, you will experience healing energy from being connected to the earth. (I read some scientific study that shows going barefoot is super healthy)

4. Eating healthy food straight from your garden will also give you more energy. And if you eat it raw, with the enzymes intact, so much the better! Growing food in your own area is so much healthier than importing it from a far--both economically and physically.

5. You will inspire others to grow gardens in their front yards. I just think that with your enthusiasm and joy that you are experiencing in having a beautiful front yard garden, you will see others joining you. If you host a community gathering in your neighborhood, one of the things you can do is have a discussion group or class about organic gardening. I can see it now--every neighborhood with beautiful vegetable gardens, fruit trees, berries, and herbs throughout the neighborhood.

6. You could expand to having a community garden and engage even more cooperation and people power.

7. You could share and trade produce with neighbors, thereby increasing good will and also perhaps even alleviate hunger. All good will that you generate makes it so that people are more receptive when you share how Ron Paul supports this revolutionary action of growing food. (Wouldn't it be great if he would talk about this issue specifically?)

Well, I just found a website that relates to this topic.

My vision: A slide show of the Community Gathering

This slide show is still in process, but I believe that anything worth doing is worth doing imperfectly. I would love your feedback. I appreciate you watching this--it is the first time I have ever done a slide show!