Of Flowers

I’m sitting at my desk, drinking hot tea of .         chamomile, .     peppermint, .   licorice, and honey. There’s a book open, in the pool of lamp light. It’s William Carlos Williams’s Collected Poems, at “Asphodel.” Reading it is like descending, step by step, into a deep sorrow, from .   root, …

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 …

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 …

Thoughts on Technology in the Face of a Blizzard

And here we go again. Nemo is upon us, starting to throw what will amount, according to the forecast, to buckets of snow. Of course the power is going to go: we expect it now. And as I alternate staring out the window with staring at the Wundermap, I realize how contradictory and conflicting my feelings …

Wise People and Cobblers

In my journal I wrote: Understanding comes and goes as huge, crashing waves. One recedes and the other comes. It’s hard to catch your breath. I had just finished reading Stephen Jenkinson’s latest post, “There’s Grief in Coming Home,” when I looked up and I must have had an expression on my face for Amie asked: …

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 …

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 …

On (Not) Saving the World, One Element at a Time

(I’m thinking of this third post today as a Transitiony kind of post…) When I show people around the place, I finally (after five years) feel like it’s all coming together, and that’s because I have started thinking in terms of elements. Breaking the enormous task of creating a “sustainable place”  up into elements allows me …