September 28, 2014: Online Work Bee

Revision 42903

Date
Author
SolSeed archive migration
Comment
Create maintainable Markdown archive revision
Size
5816 bytes
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+12 bytes

Agenda

Parking lot

Check-in (gratinews)

WW(W)s from last time

WWWs

Daily Practice

tips:

Weekly Events Logistics

Weekend Service rotation: Eric, Shelley, Brandon, Ben

Midweek

Newsletter

SolSeed members have had a busy, exciting summer, from camping trips and a cottage repair project in Canada, to volunteering for the Sierra Club at festivals around Seattle, to visiting Mini Maker Faires in Ottawa and Portland. Naturally we missed a lot of work bee calls, but thanks to our new schedule with both Sunday and Thursday meeting times, we still managed to hold twelve work bees this summer. So what have we accomplished? Quite a lot, as the unusual length of this newsletter indicates.

Our outreach efforts are starting to bear fruit! We're now in contact with Dr. Michael Mautner of the Interstellar Panspermia Society, whose goal is to send simple lifeforms to kick-start evolution in newly-formed star systems across the Milky Way. Clearly, we all need to read his book! I also took a trip to southern Washington State to renew our contacts with the Windward intentional community, which seeks to model sustainable ways of life that work with nature rather than against it. And Eric recently joined the blogging community on the Humanistic Paganism website, with a beautiful first entry about why he loves the SolSeed Movement.

Eric's main point in that post is about the value of shared religious practice, so it's particularly appropriate that we've just completed our first liturgical year, a sequence of eight Sabbath rituals that celebrate the evolution of life, intelligence, and space colonization. The two "liturgical seasons" of summer celebrate the origin of humanity and the rise of civilization, thus setting the stage for the futuristic stories of autumn in which life expands to take root on worlds across the solar system, the galaxy, and ultimately the wider universe.

As a first step toward realizing that vision, Eric and his son Patrick are experimenting with growing duckweed in sealed containers. Like any scientific research program, this one has had its share of failures, but we're committed to improving our methods until we can consistently keep these simple plants alive long enough to harvest them. Brandon is helping by researching sensors we can use to monitor the duckweed's environment.

Speaking of greenhouse environments, the SolSeed Movement joined a Portland rally and march on the Autumn Equinox as part of the largest global climate-change protest event in history. The previous day, I had presented a half-hour talk at the Seed Village on the basics of greenhouse emissions and what people are already doing to counteract global warming, followed by a sign-making party. This event attracted three new acquaintances, including a polar-bear keeper from the Oregon Zoo!

Our outreach efforts will continue to expand this autumn, as Eric presents a sermon at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ottawa next week, I continue working on the next music video for "The Seed," and we all make a big push to get the ball rolling on next summer's Kindred Festival! Stay tuned for more details.

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