Silk Road Cooking in Massachusetts

  I just published a review of Najmieh Batmanglij’s wonderful cookbook, Silk Road Cooking. A Vegetarian Journey on Suite101.com. You can read it here. It did occur to me that the Silk Road and many of the other ancient trade routes that Batmanglij travels in this book are about as non-local as you can get! How …

Throwing Spears with Weller, Shepard, Jenkinson, and a Dream

{The following is an offshoot and distraction from another, much more difficult post, which can be read here.} Via my studies of Stephen Jenkinson I found this talk on grief by Francis Weller,  In it, Weller likens the history of mankind to a 100 foot long rope. The first 99 feet represents humans in nature, hunting, foraging, defending …

Activism: Newton 350 Draw the Line Rally

The idea for this weekend was for us to go the Amherst, MA, for me to do a three-day training in Effective Groups while DH and Amie did some sightseeing and goat research – lots of people with goats in Amherst! However, DH fell sick and we had to cancel the whole thing. So Amie …

Thoughts on Earth Day 2013

What a rush. Wayland’s 2013 Earth Day Weekend, organized by Transition Wayland and the Wayland Green Team (both of which I am an active member), is over. It was a two-day community extravaganza of open houses all over town: people showing their retrofitted or super insulated houses, gardens, solar PV and Hot Water systems, heat …

Grief under the Full Moon

Though very tired I went on the Full Moon Walk yesterday evening, a lovely tradition or what we hope will become a tradition, when a group of us walks in the dark under the full moon, either quietly or in conversation. The clouds drifted apart enough to let the moonlight through only at the end …

Riot for January 2012 – Month 39

This is the Riot for the month of January 2012 for the three of us. My summary of the first three years is here. Edson fixed the calculator: all go tither to crunch those numbers! Gasoline.  Calculated per person. Our bugbear again. DH’s shuttle to work wasn’t running because of the holidays, so he had …

Mixed Up Library

Yesterday I finally straightened out my library. I found it to be a strange mixture of Gardening, Herbalism, Ecology, Botany, Beekeeping, Environmentalism, Ethics, Drawing, Interior Design, Transition, Native American history, Latin (!), etc. Also poetry and some novels (Harrison, Bass, Oliver). At the moment I’m reading Ceremonial Time, Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile …