Lose the Chocolate

Ostara's the time when many would say: Loose the chocolate.

But me, I say: Lose the chocolate.

For religious reasons, lose it.

***

I live in Minnesota. It is wrong—wrong—that, in the stores here, apples should be expensive, and bananas cheap.

Wrong.

 ***

Chocolate, like copal and bananas, is an exotic visitor from the fabled Southern lands of Ever-Summer. There's the connection with Ostara: think of it as sympathetic magic.

In a few years, most of the world's cacao trees, grown unsustainably in inappropriate places where—as a cash crop—their cultivation has helped to destroy sustainable local agriculture, will be dead from cacao blight, anyway.

By then, of course, oil will be running out in good earnest, and it will no longer be economically feasible to move foodstuffs over large distances.

Then chocolate will once again become the expensive exotic that, by rights, it ought to be.

 ***

Spring is sweet, and it's right to welcome Spring with sweetness.

But better it be when that sweetness is local sweetness.

This Ostara, and every Ostara, fill your basket with Spring's true sweetness.

Maple sugar: the gift of Hare.

 ***

So, Posch: how is this a religious issue?

Oh my pulse, we're pagans.

For us, climate change is a religious issue.