I’ve read Martin Shaw’s book Scatterlings a couple of times now and I keep finding hoards of riches. Here’s a good introduction to it, filmed by Ian MacKenzie:
Category Archives: place
An Opening Up
I like the summer, I do. The garden thrives. Biomass! I don’t have to wear socks or break ice in the chicken’s water bucket. The water that’s been cooking in the hose for a couple of days smells of Earth. Staying up late, loving the lateness of the light. On Full Moon nights, I run out …
More Seedlings at the Center of the Universe
More and more lights are being switched on in the basement. In fact, we’re almost full up! We’ve got three shelves going now, the bottom one with heat mat, the top two for “growing up” and cold germinators. I also have  a couple of flats sitting on the shelf in the porch, behind a curtain: …
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A Room of One’s Own – A Common Space for Communities
This is an attempt to reboot my reporting.  I am discovering a lot about the world, others, and myself, at record speed. Gotta write it all down! And I’m going to need some new Categories. Here’s where the blog undergoes its next transformation. ~ In our town, where can a group of people go where they …
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Transition, Redux
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 …
Power Down
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 …
I got NOTHING done!
Amie’s idea of cleaning up As I was vacuuming I deplored (again) how often the work of a homemaker is lost. It is lost when half an hour later the flour gets spilled and a day later the dust bunnies are convening under the sofa again. It is lost when the dishwasher is full – …
Transition: Becoming Indigenous to a Place
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 …
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Transition Initiatives: the Giving of Gifts
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 …
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Another Composty Day – and Our Garden
I set up the kindling dryer – very simply the old soil screen under the shed roof. Amie and I hauled some more kindling, because I figured once it starts snowing it won’t be visible and for the picking anymore. I also finished the putting to bed of the beds. As I was looking around …