Be joyful though you have considered all the facts
A week or so after my “I need to do something!” moment I stumbled across Wendell Berry’s essay “American Imagination and the Civil Way”. It pretty much answered my question, “But What?” The answer was Transition, of course, or more generally speaking, going out there and talking to people. This one’s philosophical. I hope you …
Continue reading “Imagining the Other – Reflections in Transition”
A friend came by today to pick up straw bales for his gardenĂ‚Â (I also gave him the quince atchar he supplied the quinces for, and my infamous apple peel jelly). He asked me why I am trying Transition again. I couldn’t quite answer clearly. I’m not clear in my head about the many causes …
I wrote some time ago about needing to do something beyond my own backyard. It didn’t take long before I figured out what that should be. Transition! (Almost exactly a year ago I attended Transition training in Boston. You can read about it here and here.) Taking advantage of a rare intrepid, or should I …
You know, the weather turns and you’re cutting the perennials down to the ground and mulching the berries and storing away your gardening tools and then you finally have the time to pick up a book and BAM! David Holmgren, in Permaculture: The evidence of 4000 million years of evolutionary history is that, if we …
Do you think about the future? Do you wonder what it will be like? Or do you live like it’s always going to be the way it has been? ~ I found at least 5 entries like this one, all in drafts, abandoned. As I prepare for the growing season with more resolve and urgency …
After two weeks of virtually no blogging, it’s lists like these that can get me going again. Yesterday I listed this week’s goals, today I’m looking at the Big Homesteading Plans for 2010. There is some sort of order here, but don’t ask me which. Chicken coop (cob? attached to greenhouse? moat?) and 6 (?) …
I’m reading Edible Forest Gardens (EFG) again, alongside Holmgrens’ Permaculture. I’m underlining and taking notes in the books and making summaries on a quadrille pad. I’m on volume 2 of EFG, which is the most practical volume of the two, and I foresee a lot of drawing up of plans as I come across passages …
During the Transition Training we watched a lot of images and videos of Transition Initiatives, and at first I watched them with mixed feelings of joy and anxiousness. My heart sank because I inevitably thought: “I can’t make that happen.” That sinking feeling stems from the fact that, though I arrived here over 11 years …
Continue reading “Transition: Becoming Indigenous to a Place”
I discovered Rob Hopkins’ book, The Transition Handbook, about two years ago and it immediately struck me as the right approach to our problems – climate change, peak oil and economic crisis (all bound up together, of course) – and to our solutions (grassroots, positive, pro-active, hopeful, inclusive). It still took me a long time …
Continue reading “Transition Initiatives: the Giving of Gifts”
Amie has often expressed an interest in my journal – in the book itself (the journalist Moleskine) and in the process. I haven’t been writing in my journal regularly, but over this weekend revived my resolution to do so. This morning I pulled it and she asked if she could have a journal too, just …