Page 22 RAIN July 1978 ~~ 0 ~l :l • I ; ' . , . . ,. ... • . I • ; . ! ,' 0 • J ' ii' •, I I . , l .- : ~ " \ I ( 0 • • •. •O ... • • 0 Summer has come to the Northwest, and a new season casts light upon the folks.at RAIN. Flux is the normal state of affairs here, but it seems as if the currents are flowing stronger lately. We are more self-conscious of ourselves as a group sharing in a common task. Sometimes we are drawn to the center of things, sometimes we move to the periphery. We try to b_alance our individual paths with a larger vision; each has its power. The light shifts and every day has its shadows. Still, there is good work and good times to balance the mysteries of the season. And there is RAIN ... • l2aindr-ops So what's all this sun doing here? I can swear they told me it rains all year 'round. "Well kept" secrets aside, people around here are shaving, cutting ha_ir, wearing shorts and taking calls on the back steps. Linda and I are readying the tiny side yard for a biodynamic/ French intensive style garden. (I've heard intensive planting really had its origin in Vietnam and was imported by the French.) She's built new compost bins and I've been mining old slabs of concrete from our partially abandoned driveway to make room for food.'Joan says she sees the day when all those over-sized parking lots are torn up so the cities can breathe and feed themselves once more . ... There's no shortage of busy people around here. Apart from the usual ac-. tivities: Tom and Lane just passed the • "topping out" stage in the rebuilding of their home at the coast. There was a small but happy celebration. Lane's been working with Gigi Coe on the final phases of their new a. t. reader, and Tom ~eynoted a recent conference in Color.ado: "Through the Looking Glass-A.T. and Beyond." Lee has been making. preparations for the upcoming Solar '78 conference for the Pacific Northwest, and has been planning exciting testimony for the re-convening of the Pebble Springs nuclear plant siting hearings. ,I was back in Ohio and Michigan a month ago and participated in the reunion/ seminar of the Ann Arbor environmental Network; more on that in an upcoming issue. Linda's been working with a Portland group in -the,formation of an "integral urban"-type house to demonstrate its feasibility in a large urban setting. Joan recently returned from a homeward migration to the sunflower state. All of us have been putting energy into the Oregon a.t. network, which is slowly beginning to emerge as an identifiable organization ... The members of the network lost a dear friend with the accidental death of Lynn Mathews of Eugene. Although none of us at RAIN knew Lynn well, we often shared in her good spirit at meetings and gatherings. Lynn was co-ordinator for the city of Eugene Community Garden, and had also been instrumental in the setting up of the Univ,ersity of Oregon's Urban Farm. In a particularly appropriate remembrance, nearly lOQ of Lynn's friends and family participated in the planting of 25 fruit trees at the Farm. A lot of the information RAIN focuses on has power behind it, and we'd really like to see that good energy used effectively. It's always been gratifying to see old issues get swapped and recycled, To help this whole process along, and to help strengthen our financial self-reliance, we are beginning to reassess our circulation and subscribership. This will entail doing sotne outreach work with individuals and networks whom we _feel could get good mileage out of RAIN. We may also be . working with someone who has done outreach for other new age publications. You can help this process along by suggesting RAIN to people who would find it to be of help _in their endeavors, or perhaps to your local library, where it can get into even more hands. As always, we're interested in your reactions to the ways we go about changing: The thoughts of you believers in RAIN are very important to us. Our next issue will be the combined August/September issue, and it will be in the mail by the middle of August. We do this combined issue twice a year, which frees up six weeks, rather than four, before and after its printing. So we'll be in your mailbox a little later thart usual- and having a little fun with the extra time! We hope that these summer weeks find you well, and that you are able to renew your relationship to the earth and all living things. - SA WHOOPS! A little triangle of light obscured the access information to Wendell Berry's book excerpted in our June issue. The article was reprinted from The Unsettling of America ($9.95) by Wendell Berry, by permission from Sierra Club Books, 530 Bush Street, San Francisco, CA 94108.
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