I’m not a person who attaches meaning to dreams in general. I don’t keep a dream journal and I rarely recall my dreams when I wake up. I think most of the time our dreams are simply our brains processing the day and wiping the slate to prepare for the next day. Dreams can be weird and funny and entertaining; I’ve had some trippy lucid dreams to rival a spy thriller. However, none of this precludes some dreams actually having meaning. Like the time when I was a teen and I dreamt my good friend pushed me off a cliff and then a couple weeks later she betrayed me and we were no longer friends.

Thursday I had one of those dreams that was so unusual it had to mean something.

I was with a small group of people who were going through an initiation-type ceremony to be connected with an animal. This was not a spirit animal/totem/guide thing. Our purpose in being connected to an animal was for them to become our responsibility to watch and care for that animal species and their habitat. Of course, in the process of learning to care for the animal we would learn about them and their environment and it was up to us to decide what it all meant.

The initiation began, one by one. Those of us waiting sat in a small room passing around a book of animals, speculating what animal we would be paired with. I looked at the book and a page fell open to some sort of wildcat, oh this is who I hope I’m paired with! As I waited I convinced myself the wildcat and I were meant for each other.

My turn came and I had to crawl into a small, tight cave-like tunnel. It was so small there was no way to turn over or turn around, the walls and ceiling were close. I felt claustrophobic and began to panic. Since there was a dim, soft light in the tunnel and I knew I could push myself out, I started telling myself to calm down, to focus on my breath and everything would be fine.

I calmed down and put my arm through a hole in the tunnel wall. A scarf of some kind was wrapped around it. Then I heard chanting and felt someone touching my hand, drawing figures on it. And then the chant called for an animal to choose me.

I held my breath and thought wildcat, wildcat, wildcat. And then the voice announced: sparrow!

Sparrow? I felt disappointed and cheated. And as the scarf was unwound from my arm and I was preparing to push myself out of the cave (birth metaphor much?), my morning alarm went off.

I woke up and thought, what the heck was that all about? And was still disappointed in being connected to sparrows. But I decided the dream was so unusual it meant something. Eventually I came around to not being disappointed, because even animals as common as sparrows need care. Which led me to do some internet research, of course!

I learned there are a variety of sparrows, 25 in all, and Minnesota has about 21 of them. Dark-eyed juncos, little fat birds that visit the garden in fall and early spring, are actually sparrows! This made me happy because I love the juncos. I also learned that I have probably seen and heard song sparrows in my garden, and that made me happy too.

But of course, the most common sparrow around here is the house sparrow. House sparrows originated in Eurasia, and with the help of humans, have spread all around the world. They are highly adaptable, extremely social, have managed to thrive in human-built environments, and are opportunists.

The house sparrow was one of the first animals given a scientific name in the Carl Linnaeus taxonomic system, Fringilla domestica. But this was later changed to Passer domesticus, with Fringilla being reserved for the common chaffinch and relations. There are about 12 subspecies of house sparrow.

Ok, so sparrows turn out to be more interesting that I thought. But why would I be connected to an animal that is so common? Well, it turns out that in spite of how ubiquitous sparrows are, their numbers are declining. In North America, the number of house sparrows has declined by 84% since 1966. Still, there are so many of them, no one considers them to be in any sort of danger, which is actually too bad. At one time there were so many passenger pigeons in the United States the skies would be black with them for a day or more as huge flocks passed overhead. And now they are extinct.

Nestling sparrows eat only insects for the first few weeks of their lives and the insect population is declining alarmingly. No insects, no food for baby sparrows, now baby sparrows reaching adulthood to make new sparrows, sparrow numbers decline. We know insect populations are declining because of industrial farming practices that rely on monocultures, plow edge to edge leaving no hedgerows, and most of all, a heavy use of pesticides.

Lesser contributions to their decline include predation from sparrowhawks and domestic cats, and avian diseases.

Clearly sparrows are in need of care. And it turns out that caring for sparrows also means caring about a whole bunch of other things too–everything is interconnected and this is becoming clearer the more I read. Which, now that I think of it, I began reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s translation of the Heart Sutra, The Other Shore, a couple of weeks ago and it is all about interbeing. I have always understood this on an intellectual level, but now my sparrow dream and research is bringing it out of my head and into, well, my heart.

March 20th is World Sparrow Day. I now have a new holiday to celebrate! I also have a lot to learn about sparrows, and plenty of work to do to care for them.

All because of a dream.

In other news, the onion seeds I planted last weekend began sprouting yesterday. Yay! No other seeds get planted indoors until March second when the jalapeños, the seeds of which we saved from the jalapeños in our csa box, will get their chance. Since I have no idea what variety they are, I have dubbed them Eduardo’s jalapeño, after our csa farmer. I suppose I could email him and ask, but that would take all the fun and mystery out of it.

Speaking of my csa farmer, I mentioned several months ago that he had said in his final newsletter of the season that it was probably his last year of farming. This prompted me and James to decide we would try and grow in our garden some of the vegetables we always got in our boxes.

This week Eduardo sent an update email. He has sold the farm and is moving back to Minneapolis. His daughter is entering high school and is the only person of color in their rural school. Wanting to make sure his daughter has a good high school experience, he is leaving the work he always wanted to do. This broke my heart in so many ways!

On the good news side, he is going to open a tortilleria, probably within easy cycling distance of my house. And until he gets that going, he wants to know if we’d be interested in a tortilla csa? Um, yes please! He has offered a tortilla csa share a few times and his traditionally made tortillas are the best I have ever had. So we are excited to be able to continue to support him even though he won’t be farming anymore. I have no idea when the tortilla csa will start, but I hope it won’t be a long wait!

Reading

• Poem: To a Certain Lady in Her Garden by Sterling A.. Brown. “Colorful living in a world grown dull, /Quiet sufficiency in weakling days, / Delicate happiness, more beautiful /For lighting up belittered, grimy ways—”
• Article: Atlantic Ocean is headed for a tipping point. A few months ago a report came out about the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) that indicated it could collapse as soon as 2030. It made a lot of fuss for a very brief time and then the mainstream media dismissed it because it could by 2030, or 2050, or 2090, no one could say for sure, and no one had any idea what the immanent collapse indicators looked like. Well, a new report came out this week, one that has not made an appearance in the mainstream press because it has real and specific terrifying information in it. The researchers have determined the AMOC tipping point, and it has to do with salinity. Once that tipping point is reached, collapse of the AMOC will happen in an estimated 1-4 decades. When the current collapses, temperatures in Norway will drop 36F/20C without the warm water the current brings north. Temperatures in Europe and North America will also fall. And south of the equator will heat up fast without the cool water the current brings south. The researchers can’t say how close we are to the tipping point, it all depends on how fast the freshwater ice covering Greenland and the arctic melts into the ocean. But since the ice sheets are melting faster than scientists expected, well, I’ll leave it to you to decide if this is anything to worry about.
• Book: Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant. This is a fantastic history about the Luddite uprising. I plan on writing a whole post about it soon!

Listening

• Podcast: Tech Won’t Save Us: AI Hype Distracted Us From Real Problems. This is a new to me podcast and this is the first episode I have listened to. It was so good! All about AI, how tech companies are shaping regulation, labor exploitation, and how big tech is cozy with the military and the Israeli military specifically. If you don’t want to listen, there is a transcript at the link.

Watching

• Series: Mr. & Mrs. Smith. We just watched the first episode and really enjoyed it. Will definitely be watching more!

Quote

They [tech executives] get to take all the money to tell us how it’s the best thing, and then take all the money saying they are also the solution. They’re the problem and they’re the solution. And this is a sign of amassing power and privilege. And that when we talk about the real risks of AI, versus whatever they’re thinking about, in my opinion, it’s because they can’t fathom any of the real things, mundane things, affecting human beings, to get to them.

Temnit Gebru in the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast

James’s Kitchen Wizardry

This week James made a delicious chili based on this pumpkin walnut chili recipe. I say based because he used the crock pot, forgot to put the pumpkin in, and decided not to add the black beans because the chili was already so thick that it didn’t need anything else. We’ve had it three times and the rest has gone into the freezer and will come out at some point to become, perhaps, chili cheese fries.

James also made peanut butter and jelly cookies, his own recipe. Such a tasty treat!