It was a joke I had with a cat, once. She would ask to come in, or inquire for dinner, and I would show her my hands and say, “Look! I have hands, fingers, and thumbs! Ha ha!” At the time, I guess I was thinking that night vision and the ability to run on…
What is time? What is time for? The measurement of a breath, the space between breaths. Sleeping, waking, toil, and play. The passage of a season in planting, tending, harvesting, and preservation. The celebration of birthdays, holidays, moments of intensity. The currency of our lives. In the time it took for me to mulch my…
As I was picking blackberries this morning, I was startled by a little snake. She was suspended in the blackberry thicket, maybe finding the air more pleasant than the wet ground, maybe hunting the frogs that inhabit the ditch below the berries. For just a moment, I was an Eve – thinking about fruit, but…
“Change can change back. (We can go from conservative to liberal, from disciplined to undisciplined…) Change is volatile. Transformation is completely different – though sometimes it is called change. Transformation never makes the past wrong. It transforms it. It doesn’t deny it. It honors it in a way that you can move forward without making anything wrong,…
Goats seem prone to discontent. Maybe it’s an adaptation strategy developed over thousands of years of hanging out with humans. Sometimes their capriciousness is a little too familiar. They pull at their ropes, always focusing on something just beyond their reach. They kick their back legs, both in the joy of freedom and in the…
Here we are, before we begin practicing yoga. There’s a lot of life here. Lots of good stuff. Plenty to learn, and room to grow. But it’s kind of chaotic. Unorganized. Wild. So, we start doing some asana. By “asana” I mean a series of physical exercises designed to stabilize and strengthen our bodies so…
I am a radical extremist. I was radicalized at an early age, by living in the deep woods. I became accustomed to the presence of the Living World and found the company of tall, quiet, mature trees and the living soil congenial from a young age. By the time I was a young adult, I…
We live almost at the end of a very rural road. People drive through a mile of deep woods and over six small creek crossings before coming to our house, if they even notice our house for all the trees. I’ve been contemplating what it means to me to live on this road, and have…
We’ve been milking this sweet young goat for nearly two months now and I have hardly written anything about her. There’s a reason for this. The learning curve is steep and round. Annie is new to milking, and so are we. Here’s how it has been: First thing in Lulahs’ morning, she and I load…
We’re a yoga farm. By that, I don’t mean that our place is an oasis of tranquility and relaxation where people come to probe the depths of their mystical souls. There might be moments where those kinds of things happen, but that’s not what I mean. Yoga practice here lately happens when it’s been gray…