NATURE ATTUNEMENT

I've only been living in the Northeastern United States for eight years; having grown up in the high deserts of Arizona, I grew up attuned to a far different climate and life-cycle than I find myself in now. My family is an outdoorsy one; I grew up camping, fishing, hunting and with an appreciation for the nature I found around me. I'm still most comfortable in the rocky and sere landscape of my homeland, but now that I have moved to Philadelphia, I am having to learn about a whole new face of Mother Earth.

Water has always been the part of nature I paid the most attention to, having grown up in an environment that required conservation of water because there wasn't always enough of it; when I first moved to our more temperate climate, my partner would laugh at me for my unwillingness to let a tap run! I'm still rather conservative with my water usage, despite the chuckles; recent years' lower rainfalls in our area have proven me prudent.

I now live between two rivers, and most bewildering still to my Arizonan mind is the fact that these rivers actually have WATER in them! (Who knew?) There is the smaller Schuykill River, which I cross almost every day, and the much larger Delaware; these rivers form the basis of Philadelphia's water supply. The Schuykill's headwaters is the Tuscarora Springs that lie near the town of Tamaqua, PA, about 130 miles northwest of Philadelphia; the river meets the Delaware just south of where I now live, to flow into the ocean at the Delaware Bay east of Dover. The Delaware begins in New York State and forms the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border; incidentally the town of Washington Crossing 36 miles northeast of my home is of course the site where George Washington crossed the Delaware to make a surprise attack on Trenton, NJ in the Revolutionary War, a mythic moment in US history — a place no doubt of great interest to those developing an American hearth culture!

Although I've been paying closer attention to nature and have been doing some research on the trees, plants and other aspects of my local environment, my nature attunement work has begun in earnest now that my partner and I have moved to a new house in South Philly. Now that we've left the apartment we'd been living in for five years, we are in a situation that makes incorporating nature and conservation into my daily life much easier. We can now participate in the city's recycling program and I'm discovering how much of our waste output is actually recyclable: when looking at our first few weeks of recyclables versus trash, I was a little dismayed to find out that more than half of what we've been throwing away has been recyclable and am very glad that we now have the means to keep that waste out of landfills.

We also now have a back yard with a small garden plot, and I've been working my small piece of earth with the help of some organic gardening websites. Because we moved in so late in the season, there wasn't time to put in any vegetables this year, so I prepared the soil and planted a cover crop of hairy vetch, a legume that will not only help my soil avoid erosion over the winter but will add nitrogen and, when I dig it under in preparation for planting in the spring, will provide nutritious organic matter as well. I have been very excited to see my new seedlings come up! Even digging the garden up to prepare it for the vetch seeds was a meditation on the cycle of life: the garden had been taken over by morning glories and weeds, and while I couldn't help feeling a little guilty for digging them up and killing them, they will compost and provide nutrition for the plants that I will be planting to eat next year. I'm also looking forward to being able to start small-scale urban composting to further reduce our waste output and to enrich my garden's soil.

Our Druidry has provided me with an impetus to pay closer attention to the Earth on which I live and has further encouraged me to step up my efforts to protect it. My lifestyle is already greener than many Americans'; I do not own a car, relying on walking, mass transit and car sharing for the vast bulk of my transport needs, and we are exploring the possibility of enrolling in the wind power program our electric company offers. I know there is more I can do, however, and my religion gives me motivation to do all I can.

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