Someone asked me: What if you would have to move now? This was with reference to the vegetable garden, to which I have devoted many, many hours of hard labor and a whole lot more of research, hopes and dreams. My answer was: It would be no problem. Really? You could leave all of this …
Category Archives: self-knowledge
Amie Again Talks About Death
(It’s that dead bird again) Well, at bedtime Amie again asked to talk about the dead baby penguin. Again she wanted to know why there was no blood. Was it really dead? I explained that it died because it was too cold. Probably its heart stopped working. I explained that our blood needs to circulate …
Believing in Myself On this Glorious Day
The Pachy Patch in Summer 2008 yesterday was a perfect summer, spring, winter’s day: cloudless sky, 60F, the mildest of breezes, and some good hard labor. I went out, turned the two defrosted compost bins and then tackled the Pachysandra patch, a.k.a. the vegetable garden. Ah Pachysandra… It took over five hours of hacking and …
The War of Consumption and What to Say to Friends about “the Good Life”
Yesterday one of the headlines in Google was “Economy Contracts as Consumers Retreat“. There is a nice rhythm to that phrase, don’t you think? And, also like a good line of poetry, it says a lot in the most subtle of ways. The bellicosity of this phrase reveals what we all really know about consumption …
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General Malaise Barely Evaded
Why do I even look at the news – my “consumption” of which is out of spiritual necessity minimized to reading the headlines in Google News? 8-year-old boy shoots himself in the head at a firearms expo, 7-year-old boy kidnapped then shot to death, Neo-Nazi plot to assassinate Obama. The places where my jawbone fits …
Wendell Berry is my hero
Thanks to Moonmeadow Farm, this is Wendell Berry’s poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from his book The Country of Marriage (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). I hope it’s ok to reproduce it here… Oh but be fearless!  So: Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry (my hero) Love the quick profit, the annual …
A Revolution
The books I am reading are effecting a revolution in me that I would like to postpone describing for a bit: let me work through it in my journal for a while. Then I hope I will be able to put down in words, for you, what is happening in my thinking and feeling, how …
The Dream of Moving Out
Dreaming of moving out I love this place, especially when summer comes around, as it finally has. The hustle and bustle of Coolidge Corner and Brookline Village, the treelined streets, the many large, grassy parks, the general friendliness of the community, oh and not to forget the two independent bookstores, one of them the Children’s Bookshop. Work/school/daycare are less than …
My child has a life without me too
First weeks at daycare A dear friend, whose daughter was born a month after Amie and is Amie’s only playdate buddy (I’m not exactly the gregarious type), just survived their first week of daycare. The first week (for some, the second and third, too) of daycare is awash with waves of despair, glimmers of hope, heartwrenching …
Two New Articles: My Natural Birth, Parts III and IV
I’ve published two new articles in the series “My Natural Birth,” about the birth of my daughter: Part III: Giving Nature a Place in My Body My body is a temple… Once I realized this, realized it to the point of awe, I understood that my pregnancy and my birth were nature’s domain. I just had to let …
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