In the garden. On the road.

Dear friends,
Greetings from Tennessee! I arrived here in Chattanooga yesterday evening, the culmination of a long and lovely drive through California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and twenty miles worth of Georgia. Upon arrival, I immediately unloaded my bike out of Beatrice, my trusty and much beloved ’94 Buick LeSabre, to explore the city that is to be my home for the next four months. I confess to being quite enchanted by the wooded hills, the broad and meandering river, and the very livable scale and pace of Chattanooga.

Nine days and a few thousand miles ago, twenty-five of us met in the Alan Chadwick Garden to discuss the Cracks in the Pavement project and to share ideas on “underpinnings of health”, the topic of the first of several open letters I’ll be composing over the coming months (photos here). We engaged with the following questions:
-What trends in modern society might we deem healthy?
-What trends display a distinct absence of health?
-Are there patterns and characteristics common to healthy phenomena, “underpinnings of health”, that we can begin to discern, study, and employ as a means of helping us cultivate health in our own lives and in our communities?
In small groups, we came up with some wonderful thoughts and observations, some of which I include in my outline of the day’s events. We concluded the afternoon with some lovely poetry compliments of my dear friend Deena Miller and with a reading of my letter on underpinnings of health. I will post the letter in a few weeks, after it has benefited from the efforts of a small cadre of editors (thanks be unto editors!).

The next topic of discussion and writing will be technology as it relates to societal and environmental health. Within a few weeks, I plan to hold another community event in Chattanooga to discuss how various technologies have influenced and are influencing the way in which we live, relate with one another, and relate with the world at large. Since ninety-seven percent of you aren’t likely to be in Chattanooga, I would like to invite you all to share thoughts, questions, opinions and what have you on the blog or, if you would like to keep it more personal, directly with me via email.

Take care, be well, and stay tuned!
-Chad