earth day 2007

Hello,

I celebrated Earth Day by planting a tree in between rain showers. How did you celebrate? It was wonderful to feel the dirt and dig holes with my 4 year old daughter.

I designed this T-shirt for our staff and board tonight. It is for our annual retreat. We are going to be talking about the "whys" and the "now" at our retreat, but I hope that as we wear it around in public later, that it will provoke a dialogue or make people think about stewardship quietly to themselves.

April Rains

Hello Friends!

This is the view of our valley with our farmstead in the distance. Do you like the writings of Wendell Berry? I was so excited to meet him last week! He was in town to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. (Please check out their good work at www.leopold.iastate.edu.) So I drank in his poetry last week to commemorate the occasion. He signed a book for me: "To Wende Elliott with pleasure --Wendell Berry"!

We are quite wet here in Iowa. Here is my poem of the week:

Prairie Schooner

Six inches of rain
furious at the house
for being unbending and larger than the grasses
so unrelentingly pelts us

Gravel roads impassably soft
we laugh at the white capped waves that chop
the farm fields forming unlikely coastlines.

As frightened as the children of the howling
wind and house that fairly pitches and rises
our schooner on the prairie