A word about meetings - any in your neck of the woods?

The first Tuesday of every month, our local garden nursery has a meeting of the organic gardeners club. This nursery also raises and sells pork and beef that are raised humanely and fed only grass and organic grains. Their chicken is the same as, of course, then the eggs.

The variety of people who attend the meeting run the gamut from conservative to liberal, red to blue - with all green of course. The beauty of it is that we all have something in common: a love for having good, fresh, organic food to feed ourselves and our families - and usually enough for friends and local senior centers or places that help children.

This night we had one of the women talk all about herbs. Now I consider myself (as an old hippie from Santa Cruz) fairly knowledgeable about herbs and such; but if I've learned nothing else over the years, it's that the more you learn...the more you research...the more you know there is yet to learn; and isn't that just the beauty of Life itself? Then we get to share it with others.

The sad thing for some is that when folks just know they are right and turn off their own ability to really listen to others (as if they are afraid to change their minds or allow new ideas and awareness to come in), then we have much of what is going on in our country today - where beliefs have become polarized and set in stone; and played upon and manipulated by those with an agenda.

By the end of the evening, I found myself having had several really grand conversations about GMs, pesticides, bills going through Congress to make owning seeds of your own illegal - especially organic ones; and I had other grand conversations about growing herbs and growing in big pots (my kitchen garden is a bit pathetic this year, as I think I planted in an area with more shade than sun.) I'm about to plant some organic broccoli, cabbage, and bok choy - in big pots.

So, do you have a place to go and share information and learn? On organics? On Peak Oil/Climate Change? On legislation that might be going through Congress that addresses our concerns as it applies to getting from where we are to a New Day of working together; addressing the needs of a post-carbon environment? Or any number of topics that can help grow sustainable communities?

Please, let me know and I'll post them! Do you have a store/a website/a blog that addresses any or all of the above? Let me know and we can link to one another - and grow the awareness that we're all out here and working together, yes?

I'm on twitter under TeamHumanityNet, so feel free to hook up. Cheers, eat well, learn, share, and prosper.