Daily Archives: November 28, 2008

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Work, permaculture

The Most Radical Thing You Can Do

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From the Faraway Nearby
The Most Radical Thing You Can Do
Staying home as a necessity and a right
by Rebecca Solnit
Published in the November/December 2008 issue of Orion magazine

LONG AGO the poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder said, “The most radical thing you can do is stay home,” a phrase that has itself stayed with me for the many years since I first heard it. Some or all of its meaning was present then, in the bioregional 1970s, when going back to the land and consuming less was how the task was framed. The task has only become more urgent as climate change in particular underscores that we need to consume a lot less. It’s curious, in the chaos of conversations about what we ought to do to save the world, how seldom sheer modesty comes up—living smaller, staying closer, having less—especially for us in the ranks of the privileged. Not just having a fuel-efficient car, but maybe leaving it parked and taking the bus, or living a lot closer to work in the first place, or not having a car at all. A third of carbon-dioxide emissions nationwide are from the restless movements of goods and people.

We are going to have to stay home a lot more in the future. Continue reading The Most Radical Thing You Can Do →

permaculture

Dis and Dat

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Quick note:   Finally, after over 4 years I’ve cleared obstacles between garage bays, set up during and just before the renovation.  Much better.

Today I also changed the nutrient solution in the hydroponics and tried again to the encourage the eggplants to fruit.  I now have several peppers at various stages of growth.  Very cool.  At least to me.

Last I got out the chain saw and cut up the trees I cut down last week.  They went on the extra large Varmint Hotel.  You might know it by its other name, brush pile.

That seemed enough for the morning, so it’s nap time now.

General

Quotes

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Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in.—Aldous Huxley, Island

“Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. Seize the day, trust not to the morrow.” – Horace

Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap, lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.—Alan Watts

permaculture, Writing

WTS Writer’s Saving Time

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29  bar rises 29.97  2mph SSE  windchill 28   Samhain

New Moon (Moon of Long Nights)

Day after.  No turkey hangover.  But.  I have begun to reset my clock for a 10:30 bedtime.  Soon I’ll be able to get up early again and write for my usual four hours in the AM.

A bit more work outside, but the heavy lifting is done.  Now it’s putting down the black plastic, straw on top of that.  Final stroke is mulch over the vegetable beds (to add organic matter) and over the bulbs I planted.  That should all get done in the next week or so, then it’s inside time for at least four, maybe five months.

Over the course of that period I want to restart my writing routine and, sigh, work on edits and revisions.  I say sigh because my last 12 years has the litter of so many good intentions in this regard and so little to show for it.   Maybe this will be the decade.  Not that many left.

Kate has a Hanukah piece underway and some Christmas knitted and crocheted items, too.  She’s a whir of activity, a real equivalent to a woodworker in a shop.  A creative gal.