As an organic orchardist, I have learned a lot about how much good it does to worry.

None.

If it is going to freeze, it is going to freeze. If it is going to hail for a minute and ding up 70 acres of fruit, it is going to hail. Doesn't do one bit of good to fret. But that doesn't always stop us.

So as I felt that worry coming on a few nights ago, I decided to write about a few facts--what was going on in the world around me. I started with the orchard and its environs and moved it into our home. Seeing things through my children's eyes made things easier to contextualize.

You may want to try this same process, giving yourself multiple new lenses to see the same perceived problem.

Sure There Are Things to Worry About

Late March and the river is indifferent still,

too lazy to be half empty or half full.

On the ends of the branches the peach blossoms

throb inside tight gray clusters, pushing pink

despite the prediction for cold next week.

So much to ripen, if given the chance.

The air hums electric with the pollen dance

And the orchard grass is dressed in white apricot bloom.

In the shuttered room next door to my desk

sleeps a girl in her crib, a boy in his bed,

neither worried one bit about frost.

He knows that tonight there were bats in the yard.

She knows her blanket is velvety warm.

I know I go on loving, no matter the weather.

Sometimes when you open a can of worms, you realize the can is much deeper than you thought. And while you contemplate the depths of the seemingly bottomless container, a lot of the worms wriggle away, and you see you can’t possibly fit them back into the original can.

That’s what happens when you try to define sustainability; you unleash an interpretive pandemonium of squirming, unruly, slippery concepts and ideas all of which defy a proper grasp.

Imagine, then, trying to achieve it.  

And then imagine what happens if we don’t try to define and achieve some measure of sustainability. Even with our poor understanding of what sustainability really means, there’s a reason it’s become a buzz word in the last few decades. 1) Because we care, on some level, about what happens to our planet in the future. 2) Because we’re scared, on some level, that we’ve done irreparable damage to the planet, specifically to our environment, our economy, our bodies and our culture.

Let’s start with what we know—where the word came from. We start with the Latin verb, sustinere, which means “to uphold.” This is the basis for our English verb “sustain,” which means, according to the “American Heritage Dictionary,”

1. To keep in existence; maintain.
2. To supply with necessities or nourishment; provide for.
3. To support from below; keep from falling or sinking; prop.
4. To support the spirits, vitality, or resolution of; encourage.
5. To bear up under; withstand: can't sustain the blistering heat.

One thing I notice about these definitions is that they are all active. They all involve an energy input.

That’s why it’s interesting to note that when Spanish-speaking scientists try to translate the noun sustainability, they need to choose between sostenabilidad (from sostener) and sustentabilidad (from sustentar). The first is more passive, “being upheld,” while the second suggests actively upholding.

As a concept, the noun has its origins in forestry, fisheries and range management. Long before men in red silk ties were sitting in air conditioned boardrooms talking about economic sustainability or sustainable development, the miner von Carlowitz was writing about Nachhaltigkeit, a German approximation of sustainability, in reference to forestry. He was interested in the long-term productivity of timber plantations and their ability to provide construction poles for the mines. That was in the 1700s.

Over 200 years later, the term was globally popularized by the Brundtland Report. Written for the World Commission on Environment and Development, the 1987 report, titled “Our Common Future,” defined sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

That report got the world talking. And that’s good. For though the definition is noble, there’s no way to measure it, to implement it operationally or to interpret it objectively. Needs are contextual. Do you need your TV? Do you need your cell phone? Your SUV? Your organic potatoes? Your second house? I am sure we can all make good arguments for what we “need.” Just today my toddler assured me that he “needed” a new John Deere tractor toy, the kind that could pull a seeder implement.

It is easier for us to define what is unsustainable. New Zealander Alan Fricker writes, in his article “Measuring Up to Sustainability” at www.metafuture.org, “Unsustainability is commonly seen as environmental (in its broad sense) degradation, from the stresses of human population, affluence and technology on ecological and global limits. Since these stresses are all of our own construction, their control is, theoretically at least, within our capabilities.”

There is little doubt, he concludes, that our present path is unsustainable.

If we dig a little deeper into the etymology, we find that the Latin origin stems from the Indo-European root ten-, which means “to stretch” (also the basis for our words tendon, intend, and tenable).

And stretching is exactly what we are being asked to do. Stretch our preconceived boundaries in terms of what is possible and what is necessary. Stretch our minds in terms of new solutions. And stretch our individual practices.

I like, as a starting point, embracing the word sustainable in terms of more or less. In all your actions, in all your practices, you might ask yourself, “Is this more sustainable or less sustainable?”

Though it would be nice to have a clear cut definition of what constitutes sustainability—and you can find some folks who are trying at http://www.flora.org/sustain/Sustain.html—we don’t need a commission to tell us that an energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulb would be more sustainable than an incandescent one. We don’t need a report to tell us that it’s more sustainable when we ride our bike ten blocks than when we drive our Subaru there.

“But I had to drive,” you say, “I needed to be on time to my open space meeting.”

It’s a can of worms. And maybe our job isn’t to try to put them all back in the can. Maybe they’d do more good if we let them out so they could help us deal with all the compost material we’re creating. Let the wrangling with what is slippery go on …

Ohm or Om

I have tried to resist the killing frost,

to create enough heat in my defiance

to save a whole orchard of pear and peach.

As if worry could raise a May night one degree.

I invent new battle hymns in my blood.

With my friction, I try to protect the trees.

But fervor has no effect on freeze,

does not defend what browns.

The night has its way with me.

Surrender becomes my name.

Before we understand acceptance,

we must refuse to believe what is,

must wrestle with every bit of our lattice

the tide of blind inheritance

until all our nos are replaced by oms

and hum is the only law that sticks,

till we bow to the current ecstasy,

widen the scope, increase the flow,

become the rare conductor

who knows how to let go.  

The prediciton for the weather tonight: 26 degrees. Anything under 28 is enough to kill the fragile blooms and tiny fruits that already hang on the trees. There are wind machines, propane burners, irrigation techniques. But all of those are useless when the temperature drops precipitously. 

No matter how helpless she is, how is an orchardist to sleep? 

For the last year, I have noticed a similar theme in most every arena of my life. Doesn't matter what we call it. Surrender. Letting go. Acceptance. The idea is the same. I am becoming increasingly fluent in the notion that we are not in control. Nowhere is this more obvious than in our relatively new careers as organic fruit growers. 

Just over a year ago, my husband and I bought a 70-acre orchard of peaches, pears, apples, cherries, nectarines and apricots. Located on the banks of the Gunnison River on Colorado's western slope, it is both a paradise and a prison. Though it is hard to imagine a calling more compelling than growing good, sweet, nourishing food for people, it is not a light commitment. It's like having a baby. People tell you, "You just don't know until you do it how much work it is."

And they are right.

I understood work. Hard work. Long days. Sacrifice. What I did not know was so prominent in the job description: Surrender. These nights of frost in April and May have been difficult for me. As my husband likes to point out, "You like to worry."

It is not that I like to worry. It is that I am still learning about how to temper my resistance to what is and what will be. Mothering has been a wonderful primer. The orchard is like getting a graduate degree. 

If we do make it through tonight's frost with enough of a crop to care for, then there will be plenty more to worry about: coddling moth in the apples, green peach aphids in the stone fruit, hail in late summer, the list goes on.

And so surrender becomes my teacher. And resistance is another word for fear--one that must be faced. Because even if we grow beautiful fruit this summer, there is always next year, and next year, and next year. We do what we can. And then the prayers begin.

Liz came to class wearing a blue rubber bracelet on her right wrist.

“It’s to keep me from complaining,” she explained. One of her children had sent it to her. “Every time I complain, I have to switch wrists. The goal is to go twenty-one days without switching wrists.”

The idea, launched by Rev. Will Bowen of Christ Church Unity in Kansas City, is that complaint management is like anger management. In a March 6 interview he told MSNBC, “You catch yourself not articulating these negative thoughts that are in your head, and because there’s no place for them to flow, they tend to dry up.”

Not only does he disallow complaining, but also criticizing, gossiping, and the use of sarcasm. His idea has taken off like wildfire, and his congregation members volunteer to come into the church on weekends to fulfill orders for the official purple no-complaint bracelets. Anyone who makes it successfully through twenty-one days gets to return it for a “certificate of happiness.”  

It took the good rev. three and a half months to take off his purple band. Other folks have taken up to seven. Some folks, I imagine, are doomed to life with a purple appendage.

I didn’t have the feeling that Liz was the kind of woman who often complained. But Liz, like the other nearly 200,000 Americans who are taking the complaint-free challenge, it’s not easy.

We all know complainers, folks who seem to thrive on griping. If it’s not their health, it’s the weather. If it’s not the weather, it’s lack of a boyfriend. If they have a new boyfriend, he doesn’t make the bed right. Yeah. You know the type. Of course, you’re not one of them.

Or maybe, like Liz, you find that to some extent you are. Maybe we all have some propensity toward self-pity that propels us to moan, to seek sympathy, to focus on what’s wrong.

From what I can see, complaining serves at least two purposes. It helps us voice our discontent, and for sure, this is important. Whatever anger or frustration we swallow wholesale will come back up uglier and more vitriolic than the first time around. You don’t need to be a shrink to know that, though psychologist Barbara Held, author of “Stop Smiling, Start Kvetching” lends the notion credence.

But beyond venting, complaining for an audience is also a way to get attention. Like a toddler who comes running to his mom to show her his new invisible scratch so that it can be kissed, sometimes the complainer looks for something to complain about simply because he or she knows it’s worked in the past as an attention getter.

But what defines complaining, really? If I curse aloud about the rain falling in the forest, is it complaining if no one else hears?

The dictionary would say yes. To complain is to express grief, pain or discontent.

But surely it’s not so wrong to say something like, “I had a tricky day with my toddler today,” especially not if he peed on the wall, colored all his toys with permanent black marker, screamed while I was on the phone to get my attention, dumped the cat food in the water dish, threw his train track pieces around the living room, sawed off a low branch on the spruce tree in our front yard and kicked me in the shin.

Just reciting the litany of naughtinesses, is that complaining? Or is it just a statement of fact?

Somehow, I think, the kind of complaining that causes “ear pollution,” as Rev. Bowen might say, has more to do with how we focus on our grief and discontent. In the talking about it, are we earnestly looking to neutralize the emotional antecedent? Or are we thrilling in the mire, showing off our wounds for sympathy and pouring salt in them for effect?

The very word complaint hails from dramatic origins. It’s related to plaintiff, plaintive, and plaint, all of which stem from the Latin verb se plangere, to strike one’s breast in grief. The prefix com- is used as an intensifier. As if striking one’s breast in grief weren’t intense enough?

I think the art of not complaining comes down to accepting what is. Where we get into “complaining” versus describing the events of the day likely has something to do with judgment and a certain “woe is me” factor in the way we relate an incident. I don’t know how you quantify that, but if the listener needs to detox when done listening to you, chances are you're complaining.

Though the thought of a happiness certificate to hang on the wall is no inducement for me, I like the idea of monitoring and decreasing my complaints.

I think I’ll start with a pretend purple band on my right wrist. Wearing bracelets drives me nuts.

Oops. Is that a complaint?

Switch the dang pretend thing over to the left. Back to day one.

If you would like a real no-complaint bracelet, visit http://www.complaintbracelet.org/.

Spring is here near Telluride—the San Miguel River is no longer ice-locked. The first purple and yellow flowers are pushing their way through the snow. Soft gray pussy willows line the roads. And the cottonwood trees are starting to bud. It’s a time of beginnings. Happy New Year!

Though by modern standards the New Year is already three months old, historically, people celebrated the New Year in late March around the vernal equinox. According to Charles Panati in Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things, the earliest recorded New Year celebration took place in Iraq—what was then Babylon, capital of Babylonia.

And what a celebration it was! Eleven days of feasting, performance and ritual. He explains, “Initiating events, a high priest, rising two hours before dawn, washed in the sacred water of the Euphrates, then offered a hymn to the regions chief god of agriculture, Marduk, praying for a bountiful new cycle of crops. The rump of a beheaded ram was rubbed against the temple walls to absorb any contagion that might infest the sacred edifice, and, by implication, the next year’s harvest.” The ceremony was known as kuppuru, a word that was also claimed by the Hebrews in their festival of atonement, Yom Kippur. For the duration of the festival, there were parades, feasts and ceremonies that focused on seed sowing and crop growing.

The Iroquois Indians also celebrated New Years based on the crop cycle—only they had their festivities when the corn crop ripened. To signify the destruction of the old and the welcoming of the new, they would have a giant bonfire and feed it with all their old clothes, wooden utensils and unused corn. This enabled them to start their New Year completely fresh.

Like the Babylonians and the Iroquois, most cultures around the world tied their New Year’s celebrations to crops. So how did it happen that New Years came to be celebrated in January—an unlikely month for anything to happen with crops? Politics. The confusion comes from the Romans. They, too, had an ancient calendar that celebrated the New Year on March 25. But emperors and other high-ranking politicians fiddled with the number of days in a month or in a year to extend their terms in office. As a result, by 153 BC, the calendar days were completely off of the astrological markers that corresponded with the months.

To resynchronize the months to the stars, the Roman senate declared the start of the New Year as January 1, hoping to clarify the public record. Though politicians still tampered with the days, the date for the Roman New Year stuck, and as Christianity spread, so did the new date.

Commoners were not so quick to embrace the new New Year, however, and throughout the Middle Ages, the English and French continued to celebrate the New Year in spring. In France, until the mid-16th century, New Year’s Day was observed on March 25 and celebrated for a week, culminating in an evening of dinners and parties on April 1. But in 1564, King Charles declared that the Frenchman should follow the Gregorian calendar—now many times revised—and celebrate New Years Day on January 1.

Some Frenchmen resisted, others simply forgot. So for years following the king’s proclamation, the folk kept celebrating New Years with parties and gifts on April 1. As Panati explains, “Jokers ridiculed these conservatives’ steadfast attachment to the old New Year’s date by sending foolish gifts and invitations to nonexistent parties.

The butt of an April Fool’s joke was known as a poisson d’Avril, or “April fish” (because at that time of year the sun was leaving the zodiacal sign of Pisces, the fish.)” Ultimately France did grow accustomed to the January 1 date for New Years, but they grew attached, too, to a day of fooling and made it a holiday in its own right. Several hundred years later the custom came to England and was passed on ultimately to the United States.

So this April 1, why not wish someone a Happy New Year? When they give you a funny look, throw in the clincher—“April Fools!”

At three, the kid already understands the miraculous potential of honey.

“Mommy,” he says, “I have a splendid idea. Let’s get a cookie.” His eyes are impossibly bright. He tucks his chin and he turns his hands upward, a caricature of a salesman posing an irresistible idea.

I resist. He sees it in my face. He begins to twist his upper lip into a scowl, then stops himself and looks at me with doe-eyed openness. “We can shaaaare it,” he suggests.

I’m hooked. He knows I value sharing.

Truth is, I want the cookie, too, but I am willing to walk away from it. If he’d whined, I would have declined, demurring with something like, “This is so sad. You could have had the cookie if you’d asked nicely.” In fact, those are the words on the tip of my tongue. Instead, I walk up to the counter and say, “One sugar cookie, please.” Give the kid a reward.

As I purchase the prize in green frosting, I marvel at how my son is already learning how to get what he wants. “Tart words make no friends,” said Benjamin Franklin. “A spoonful of honey will catch more flies than a gallon of vinegar.”

The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy construes the popular phrase this way: “You can win people to your side more easily by gentle persuasion and flattery than by hostile confrontation.”

The idea is sound, but old Ben wasn’t the first to say such a thing. In the 17^th century, Thomas Fuller had an earlier version: “More flies are taken with a drop of honey than with a tun of vinegar.”

Supposedly, the saying hails back to a practice that predates fly paper. According to talklisten.com, “To avoid the annoying task of chasing flies in enclosed areas, an alternative was used to lure flies to traps with little effort. To capture a fly, pour honey on something and set it out in the open. When a fly lands on the honey, it becomes stuck.”

Whether or not anyone ever really did try to trap flies this way, I can promise that many metaphorical flies have been caught through such a method. Exhibit A: sugar cookie.

There is another law of attraction at work here for me. I am sure you have also noticed that once something enters your consciousness—a new word, a new phrase, or simply an old idea such as this one, we begin to bump into it all around us. And so it has been for me lately with this phrase. The “how to catch best catch flies” philosophy came up two weeks ago in a class I was teaching, and then again in an email this week from San Miguel County Commissioner Joan May. And of course the implications go far beyond a toddler getting a snack. The golden honeyed approach can be an important tool in conflict resolution.

Joan had been working with the Sage Grouse protection group to write a letter to the folks at an agency non-supportive of their cause. As she wrote to me, “The first draft was kind of nasty and accusative, which got nixed (but felt good to get it into words!) and the next was nicer, inviting them to meet with us. One of the DOW guys said, ‘I agree with using honey to attract more flies, but for the life of me I can't imagine who'd want to attract more flies.’ ”

Right.

And really, if the goal is to attract more flies, there are things besides honey that might do the trick better and less expensively. Excrement comes to mind.

Joan, seeing his point, suggested they try a new idiom on for size: Let’s extend an olive branch.

“But then,” as she writes, “who wants an olive branch, either?” That’s another column.

When it comes to saying difficult things, we often become so focused on getting the message across that we forget the potential effect of our words—how they can be like thorns underneath the fingernails of others when said the wrong way. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King said, “It is unfortunate that we still cannot disagree about violence, without being violently disagreeable.”

When shouted at, the best bet is not to shout back. That only ends up in two sore throats and two bent egos. Play it straight. Keep the voice and rate low, maintain a neutral to positive tone, and offer informative, and solution-focused words.

And if you can muster it, make it sweet. Not sugar coated, by the way. What fly is attracted to a pile of white refined stuff?  It must be genuine. Integral. Wholesome, even.  And if the message is really tough, why not deliver it with a big box of homemade cookies? Sweetened with honey, of course.

The customs officer was not amused.

It was Christmas morning, and my husband, toddler and I were returning to the States after a 10-hour flight from Buenos Aires. The only re-entry forms they’d had on the plane were in Spanish. I’d done my best to fill them out, but had struggled on words around agriculture.

The officer, apparently, didn’t understand the Spanish version either. His expression was as icy as the Dulles runways, and I could tell he’d rather be anywhere but in the basement of the Washington D.C. airport interpreting foreign forms for sleep deprived travelers. His tone was flat and dramatically matter of fact. His face was a granite grimace.

I didn’t need a psychology degree to know this man was not happy.

A study done in the early 1980s by Dr. Albert Mehrabian, a social psychologist at the University of California suggests that as much as 93 percent of a person’s emotional meaning is communicated nonverbally. When it comes to decoding feelings and attitudes, up to 38 percent of communication might occur through tone and 55 percent might be achieved through facial expression.

That suggests as little as 7 percent of our interpretation of someone’s mood comes from what the person actually says.

“Passports.”

I interpreted this terse command, coupled with his 53 percent chilly glare and 38 percent wintry tone to mean, “I hate you, I hate my job, I hate this day.”

And so it is that my red-eyed toddler began to whine, “Moooommmy, I waaaaaant my juuuuuuice.”

After years of practicing the anti-whine mantra provided to me from Jim and Charles Fay in their book “Love and Logic Magic for Early Childhood,” my response came on autopilot. I said with as much concern as I could muster, “I’m sorry, Finn, I can’t hear that voice. Can you please use a big boy voice that mommy can hear?”

In an immediate turn of tone, my boy came back with a dulcet request. “Mommy, my I please have my juice?” He had the look of a cherub on his hope-full face.

I have become accustomed to this spontaneous switcheroo ala Jekyll and Hyde, and I promptly rewarded him with his sippy cup of apple juice.

The custom’s officer, shocked by the transformation, opened like a package on Christmas morning with a teddy bear inside. His grin was so big it almost fell of his cheeks. Looking up at my son from behind the passports in hand, he said, “See, that wasn’t so hard now, was it, Finn?”

And I couldn’t help but think to myself, “Same goes for you, fella. What a change of tone! Nice to hear a smile in your voice.”

English is not a tonal language, not like Chinese, Burmese or Yoruba, in which word meanings are distinguished by pitch. For example, in Mandarin Chinese, the syllable ma might mean “mother,” “hemp,” “horse,” or “scold,” depending on if it’s a high pitch, a high rising pitch, a low fall-rise or a high falling pitch.

But that doesn’t mean that our communication is not tone dependent. Think of all the ways you might change the “tune” of the word “yes.” Practice right now saying it 1) as a straightforward agreement, 2) as a question, 3) as an agreement with reservation, 4) as an annoyed response, and 5) as a query. Five very different tones, no? Chances are your tone was falling for 1 and 4, rising for 2, flat for 3, and wavering for 5.

I thought it would be fun to write a poem called “Inflection” in which the only word is oh. On the page, it would be boring, oh, oh, oh, but in performance, the tone might carry that one syllable from shock to dismay to orgasmic delight.

Sure, it matters what you say. As Rudyard Kipling said, “Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by man.”

But as Mary Poppins said, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”

In fact, I think she sang it. With a smile on her face.

What's in a Negative? Why We Might Choose to Rephase

Consider the two following commands used recently in my house.

"Do not throw the fork on the floor."

and

"Please put the fork gently on the table."

These commands were, of course, aimed at the toddler. In truth, both resulted in the fork being thrown on the floor. Which in turn, resulted in the fork being taken away and the boy being excused from the table.

But in theory, parenting experts say that your best bet is to phrase your desired outcome in the positive. Instead of saying "Do not hit," say, "Keep your hands to yourself." Instead of saying, "Don't shout," say, "Please use an inside voice." Instead of saying, "Stop peeing in your pants," say, "Get to the potty right now!"

Apparently this positive approach works on children of all ages.

"I won't hit a deer on my way home," I told my dad last week as I walked out his front door. I was about to drive home toward Telluride from Montrose.

"You mean, you're going to drive home safely," he corrected me.

"Right," I said. "I will drive home safely." And I did.

Dad's right. As usual. A mantra should be phrased in the positive.

I remember this, of course, from linguistics. In cognitive terms, "not wanting to hit a deer" is not the same as "arriving home safely" and the negative phrasing tends to keep the "negative" idea at the forefront of the mind.

At work here is a psychological phenomenon known as LINK TBA, in which the human brain has a more difficult time processing negations. Apparently, the brain first processes "don't want X" along the lines of "having X," and then inserts the "don't." The bottom line: if you focus on what you do not want, on some level the brain imagines the object to be avoided more than it sticks to the relational word "not." And what you pay attention to is what tends to arrive in your life. Law of attraction.

My favorite example of this comes from cognitive scientist and linguist George Lakoff, who writes in "Don't Think of an Elephant" that he gives his Berkeley students in Cognitive Science 101 an initial exercise. "The exercise is: Don't think of an elephant. Whatever you do, do not think of an elephant. I've never found a student who is able to do this. Every word, like elephant, evokes a frame, which can be an image or other kinds of knowledge: Elephants are large, have floppy ears and a trunk, are associated with circuses, and so on. The word is defined relative to that frame. When we negate a frame, we evoke the frame."

He also cites the example of Richard Nixon, who learned this lesson the hard way. Under pressure to resign, Nixon addressed the nation on TV post-Watergate and said, "I am not a crook." And everyone heard he was a crook.

Not only do you plant the negative seed, you also delay your desired outcome. A study done by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in "ScienceDaily" showed that negative-voiced sentences took longer for participants to respond to than positive-voiced ones due to an increase in information-processing requirements.

Of course, it's sometimes quite difficult to think of a positive way to phrase something, especially if there's some necessary haste. For instance, how would you immediately rephrase, "Don't eat that mushroom!" Hindsight suggests that "Spit it out" or "Drop it" or even "Stop!" would all be good choices. But I have found that the mind easily races to the worst case scenario. Result: I don't easily blurt out a positive statement.

Um. See?

Well, you might try, as I am, to listen to the statements that come out of your mouth and fall out into your writing. Whether you're coaching skiing, inspiring your coworkers, reciting a mantra or trying to feed the kids dinner, if you hear a negative come out, try to rephrase it immediately in the positive.

But do not listen to what I say. Try it yourself.