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 …

Other Goings On: Racking the Wine, Painting Earth Day Signs

I see it only now, at the end of the day, how much was accomplished: cleaned out the chicken coop,  collected four eggs (we’re back to four!), inspected the beehives, painted the last of the signage for our town’s Earth Day, and racked the wine.  Four. Amie paints her own sign in the new basement …

Medicine Garden

This, dear friends, is a massive apothecary! The beginnings of it. Some of these envelopes hold just 5 seeds. Many hold seeds that need scraping with sandpaper and intricate regimes of warm-moist and/or cold-dry conditions. Some will take years (years!) to germinate. Suffice it to say, these aren’t your average lettuce seeds. Each one is …

My Weekend: Holding the Edge, With Friends

Holding the edge with a bunch of intrepid friends. A  local “rally” in solidarity with our friends marching in Washington DC.  We stayed till I no longer felt my fingertips and toes, and my speech became slurred. Then we had hot cocoa. This is the article I wrote for the local press: Waylanders Rally for …

Clarity, In Pieces (iii)

So I asked myself that: So what? So what if I feel that I need it or that I somehow deserve it? The dream of childhood, of  what we were “promised”:  a happy life that can only be better, faster, bigger than what came before. A world where problems (ecological degradation, economic shortfalls, social injustice, health problems) and …

Powerful Householding, or How to Stop Flicking Switches

I am part of a group that seeks to “green”  our church (UU). At the last meeting only women came, five of us. One of our discussions revolved around single-use paper cups during coffee hour and Sunday school. We have many mugs and we figured out how to put them back to use. The major obstacle …

The Approximate Shape of You

Well, things are picking up. With Sandy and then the election I am galvanized into action again. Plans, ideas are revived. I see new ways of making them possible. We need to start doing more climate change outreach, right now when it is fresh on people’s minds and even the politicians are talking about it. …

Disaster Preparedness, Resilience, Treading Water and Dangerous Assumptions

Amie reads Calvin and Hobbes during Hurricane Sandy (13h) power outage, 29 October 2012 So we weathered yet another storm. Or rather, we didn’t. Sandy went around us. We got some of her peripheral gusts of wind and some rain, but none of it very severe.  Half of my town was out of power.  School was …