Confluence

"a : the flowing together of two or more streams

b : the place of meeting of two streams

c : the combined stream formed by conjunction" 

That's how the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a confluence and that's what the month of February has been for me.  

Mindful Monday

We are creatures of love.

David Byrne

Talking Heads

Happy Birthdays Baby Boys!

How to Clear Thickets

Obviously there are dozens of ways to clear thickets, the method usually relates to the type of thicket.  In our case this spring we are dealing with major thickets of honeysuckle and blackberries.  This is nothing new.  Every year one of our main back yard projects includes at least some clearing of honeysuckle, often mixed with blackberry and/or poison ivy.  The difference this year is scale.  Normally we don't get much farther than cleaning the raspberry patch but with so much clean up going on around here we've needed to attack a number of major thickets.

Mindful Monday

 The subject tonight is Love
 

And for tomorrow night as well,

As a matter of fact

I know of no better topic

For us to discuss

Until we all

Die!

Hafiz

Let's Get Petty

Petty Spurge that is.

Let me explain.  You see, last summer my husband looked at me and said, "What's that above your lip?"  I hadn't paid any attention before that but I realized that there was a sort of flaky patch above my lip on the left side.  Hummmph.  I kept an eye on it and noticed that it changed a bit from time to time.  Sometimes it would scab up a little and when the scab would come off there would be almost nothing there for a few days until it started flaking again.

So I went online to look at skin cancer.  I looked at pictures until I found something that looked about like what I had,

It looked about like this, but this isn't my pic

read the accompanying article and decided (after a bit more research) that it was an Actinic Keratosis. 

A Solitary Commitment

A few days ago, I went to a  Pachamama Alliance symposium concerning the condition of the earth and the people in it and what we can do to heal the world.  I'm not going to go into the fullness of what the symposium covered, I'll just say that it made me take a close look at what I do with my own time.  Mostly I feel good about what I do.  I work to improve the fertility of my land, grow a fair amount of my food, spend some time educating others, write these two blogs and do a lot of reading.  But there is one thing I regularly do that adds no fulfillment to my life or land and does nothing to improve the lives of others . . .

Mindful Monday

At times she knew with a joyous ache that she completed him, just as she knew with the same joy that she needed him and he completed her.  How beautiful a thing it was, she thought, to be a half, to be completed by such another half!

Mary Penn in "A Jonquil for Mary Penn"

by

 Wendell Berry

Happy Valentines Day Everybody

The Good Things Will Come . . . I Promise

If you are serious about beginning a move toward a sustainable life, there's one very important thing to understand.

This is a life of delayed gratification.

And when I say delayed gratification, I don't mean that you'll need to next week to get those back yard projects and those construction projects done.  I mean you may have to wait years (and years) to get those projects done.  If you've been looking at tiny houses on the web or in magazines and have seen how adorable they are in their pristine settings, I can almost guarantee that you are seeing one of four things.

Mindful Monday

For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love.

Eudora Welty

The Optimist's Daughter

What is "A Sustainable Transition"?

A Sustainable Transition (this blog) is the story of one family (my family) and their journey out of the cash economy or wage slavery and into a life of direct work.

Wage slavery is not all that far off from chattel slavery.  In chattel slavery an individual has no rights and no freedom of movement.  All of the worker's activities are meant to enrich the owner.