Rake your leaves
On Dec 9 and 11 I’ll have the garage open for making candle-holders. This will be a low-pressure learning environment especially suited for learning some basics of wood work and being in a workshop space.
scrap wood candle-holder
whittling away
You will learn by doing, and take a candle-holder home with you (or at least the start of one.)
Among the specific skills I’ll introduce for you to try will be:
Familiarity with basic wood working hand tools
Measuring, marking
Cutting with cross-cut and joinery saws
Drilling with a brace and bit
I’ll give suggestions on how to finish the project, and offer you to return to complete the project at a later mutually agreeable time.
You’ll feel good seeing your work and learning on your supper table, or providing some light during a time of quiet and prayer. Tangible, material prayer.
As raking leaves can be.
Raking leaves… a prayer?
Dwelling with what has fallen, what changes colors, with the glories of autumn, with what will be near to the earth as the the land dreams in winter what will grow in the coming spring and summer
Using a fan rake, with your own hands, working with others, using a tarp is generally very effective.
Effective yes, but it may also offer you that time of quiet, of relaxing the tense hold on your being, a moment to relax amidst doing.
A bit more though on leaf raking…
Amidst the UN climate conference, in the US there has been a hubbub about leaf blowers. They will be phased out in the US state of California
Now about these. I pick no bones, I think leaf blowers are noisy, smell, not convivial technology. They are a mis-use of small engines, which are truly quite a wonder, and could be focused for very appropriate tasks.
So I’m not defending leaf blowers.
Use rakes, mulch and compost your own leaves, or… plant city and suburban landscapes that don’t require such a degree of tidiness and manipulation, where leaves can lay where they fall.
That said, while reading a bit about the hubbub, I’ve seen a study from 2011 cited in very sloppy and misleading ways to suggest not only how bad gas powered lawn care equipment is, but also how relatively benign automobiles are!! A subtle piece of industrial automobile system propaganda…
Specifically, what the study in question found found is that two cycle leaf blower engines produced more carbon monoxide and non-methane hydrocarbons in an afternoon than a brand spanking new f-150 does driving cross country. The specificity is important. This otherwise considerable opinion piece from 2021 cited the above study, using the vague word ‘pollution’, stating that an afternoon of leaf blowing creates more ‘pollution’ that a cross country truck trip.
I’m no chemist, but that doesn’t ‘smell right.’
If by pollution you mean the above toxic gases, then evidently this is true. Great, cleaner burning engines! But what about CO2 emissions? No way! How many gallons of gas does an f-150 burn driving cross country? It may emit far less CO or non-methane hydrocarbons than older models did, but ask your friendly engineer, chemist to figure out the reaction ratios-a cross country drive in a truck that gets 25 miles to the gallon pumps out way way more CO2 that the dirty burning unimproved two-cycle leaf blower operating for several hours. I would expect differences here in orders of magnitude, not in the trucks favor.
It seemed a bit like turning something true into a warrant for those us us who have a choice about it to just keep driving more.
So, lest I be mis-understood…
Let’s use small engines that burn cleaner and are used for targeted jobs…and let’s not forsake the simple and low-tech ways of working available now to the hands of humans in favor of a horizon of high-tech climate change mitigation technology.
(A good example being regenerative agriculture and agroforesrty, which builds soil health and productive harvests, without expense technology and green revolution fertilizer rates.
Let’s drive less as we are able, live closer to home, tend the ground near us…
Start by buying a leaf rake,
pick it up with your own hands,
and let your afternoon raking be a prayer,
good for you, good for earth…