March 9, 2010

Avocados, Walking the Talk, and Living With What We Need


Avocados.  Yum.  Creamy ripe avocados.  I can just taste the delicious guacamole I could whip up with dinner tonight.  But what do avocados have to do with healthy, sustainable home construction?  I'll get to that in a minute.

Walking The Talk
It is a lucky feeling indeed to believe that the construction of your home is in able hands. To further say that your construction site supervisor is a deeply caring and meticulous steward of your healthy + green home is truly a privilege.  THE CONCORD GREEN HOME has benefited from the knowledge, experience and wisdom of just such a person.  Not only is Patrick Hughes a skilled craftsman, he embodies what is good in the movement to be more responsible humans on this delicate planet.  Thank goodness Aedi Construction found Patrick just as they were awarded our project.

Patrick Hughes, construction site supervisor for THE CONCORD GREEN HOME, environmentalist, author and poet, skilled craftsman, musician, and more - a modern day Renaissance Man.

Patrick took the bold and empowering step of transforming his career to match his values.  After overseeing the construction of large estates and municipal buildings, Patrick now works primarily on projects that embody the sustainable principles in which he so fervently believes.

A sample of his writings will give you a better glimpse of the man.

Living With What We Need
Here is an excerpt from a sermon Patrick gave at a local church on sustainability.  Would have loved to be in the pews that day.

"...if we didn’t desire those commodities that are outside our reach, then maybe we could find a way to live without them. What becomes the central theme of our evolution is ... we have only been a short while on this earth, and it was a paradise before we ate at the tree of knowledge, left the garden and in our quest to get back to that paradise, started trying to improve the world we were given to live in. But the path chosen was the one where we always took more than we needed so that the delicate balance needed to sustain life on earth is always straining to keep up."

Patrick's point, made so eloquently by his recasting of the nine levels of hell in Dante's Inferno as a rating system of our own "greenness" in relation to our consumption of avocados, is that we can learn to live with what is abundantly available to us, rather than pressing for more.  As the old cliche goes, Less IS More.  If you don't live where avocados grow naturally, eat something else that is locally grown and just as delicious... or grow your own. :)


For Patrick's complete sermon, click here.  Enjoy, live well and do it with a sense of purpose.

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