[This is my October column for Livelihood magazine. I’m posting it here, temporarily, until it appears on the Livelihood website. Enjoy!] In past columns, I’ve purported to know what I’m talking about. This month, for a change, I’d like to explore something that remains mysterious, perhaps to you as well: how to create and maintain […]
I wrote this song in 2006, after completing my Permaculture Design Course at the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center in Occidental, California (and Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature). When I sand it last week at the NYC Permaculture Festival, some listeners requested a recording. Here it is, with lyrics: Oil runs down from […]
At first, she thought the tools didn’t belong in her writing area (which double, tripled, quadrupled, quintupled as her bathroom, dining table, charging station, ancestor altar, art studio, and so on). After all, she hadn’t put them there—she simply hadn’t bothered to remove them. Once she’d wiped the blackened boards of the ancient workbench a […]
[A few months ago, I published a review of Sanction, Volume I, by Roman McClay. Today, I received this commentary on that same book, along with a request that I post it anonymously. Having consulted my pendulum, and received a reading of harmony with my Sacred Heart, I decided to go ahead and do so. […]
Welcome to my new podcast, Undercurrents! Enjoy! Episode #1 (20 August 2019): Live vs. Dead Power with Trike Impresario Gregg Zuman Gregg Zuman, founder and principal of NYC-based trike-services company Revolution Rickshaws, and a long-time pedicab driver, reveals why trikes have not yet taken over the world—and how they still might!
[In late summer 2004, a couple weeks before I left Zendik Farm, a dog named Apache ripped a chunk out of my left calf, while I was diving into the pond. This scene, in which I reckon with the bodily aftermath of that attack, didn’t make it into Mating in Captivity. But I do so […]
[In this guest essay, Cara Judea Alhadeff, PhD, tells how she came to be living in a converted bus, at Earthaven Ecovillage, with her son Zazu and her partner, Rob Mies. For another angle on the story, please read Rob’s companion piece, “Building Our Home in 30 Days…in the Dead of Michigan Winter!” Scroll all […]
[In this guest essay, Rob Mies tells how he came to be living in a converted bus, at Earthaven Ecovillage, with his partner, Cara Judea Alhadeff, and her son Zazu. For another angle on the story, please read Cara’s companion piece, “Permaculture Love Story, a Dung Beetle’s Perspective.” For more photos of the conversion process, […]
Each morning, I engage in what I call “positive brainwashing”—I listen to a voice memo of myself reading a series of supportive texts (written in response to prompts from kick-ass life and career coach Sarah Mac), with the first few songs of The Complete Scottish Bagpipe Collection playing in the background. Here’s one such text; […]
In the days and weeks and months and years before MOSS, Madgelma had thought, a lot, about the polyculture of stories. She remembered learning, in high school biology, that scientists liked to conduct experiments on Drosophila melanogaster—the fruit fly—because it reproduced so quickly: they could observe, within forty-eight hours or so, the implications of a […]