It’s about time to dig those sweet potatoes. Jewels waiting to be found under the soil. It’s about time to throw a Biodynamic Conference. It’s about time to mow down the rank growth of Summer, and feed it to the Fall. It’s about time to sow cover crops. They need time to grow while the…
If you’re running short on trouble… If you’re life has too little drama… If you’re lonely… Or just have too many rose bushes and honeysuckle vines… get yourself a goat. I feel silly gloating over our two little goats when our fellow radicals have milk cows and triple digits of lambs on the ground, but…
“You cannot step in the same river once.” ~ Chuang Tzu (maybe) The weather has changed again. After so many days of the children running outside barefoot, talking about Spring. After a roof and walls went up on the outbuilding so large I think we could almost move into it. After surveying the damage of…
First, I heard it. Old trees being felled on a wealthy man’s land. The sound of Greed. Then, everywhere I walked, its present was evident. I saw it in the roiling mud of a flooded stream, in the eroded hillside above. I smelled it in the putrid rich stink of industrial chicken litter being…
“So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men. Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth? “ ~Wendell Berry, from “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” Interestingly enough, I heard Wendell Berry…
It is next to impossible in the middle of the night, when the sound of my family’s sweet sleeping fills my heart, to make peace with the senseless violence, the greed, and random tragedy of the world. These specters haunt my warm bed and torment my sleepy thoughts into a frenzy. I cannot protect those…
As the season winds down, we start getting bookish around here. Even though the to-do list is still too long, I see school buses out on the roads and start thinking that we ought to do our own version of that. That. That school-thing. I know I wrote a piece, sometime last year, about homeschooling/unschooling….
Once upon a time, I visited the Roof of the World. It was a long flight. The airplane flew all the way up, then seemed to come only half way down, and there we were, in Lhasa. This time of year, I think about Tibet often. It was this time of year, something like thirteen years…
There is a teaching I received from Gary, my yoga teacher. He credits it to the Kabbalah. It’s been on my mind lately. Here it is, roughly, from my old notes: Let your body be a throne for your mind. Let your mind be a throne for your heart. Let your heart be throne for…
Lately at our house Time has been the final frontier. We’re feeling its elasticity. Sometimes it snaps us around, sometimes it stretches us out. Summer squash and green beans ripen as we watch and want to be picked every hour. Peaches go from perfectly ripe to messy mush in less than a day. Then there…