[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 […]
Madgelma didn’t know what had gotten into her, on that particular day; she did know that the sweep of her arm seemed inexorable, as she shoved that first laptop off the table. She was staying at a hostel in Scotland, on the sacred Isle of Iona. There was a sign posted on the door to […]
Let’s talk about violence. Violence is. It manifests in countless forms, beyond shootings and knifings and fist fights. I sometimes call motor vehicles “motor weapons” because of the swath of death they leave in their wake (30,000-40,000 humans, and uncounted non-humans, die each year on the road, in the United States alone). And then there’s […]
In my last post, I reviewed an epic, partly autobiographical novel called Sanction (which I am not necessarily recommending for your reading pleasure, as it is shocking and horrifying in some ways, and decidedly not for the easily offended), by Roman McClay. Among its many unusual features are detailed renderings—from the author’s life—of drilling for […]
I don’t re-read books, as a rule—but I am now re-reading Sanction (Volume I), by Roman McClay. Why? Let me tell you a story. In 1994, when I was a freshman at Harvard, my mother gave me a copy of a book—published by The Subway and Elevated Press Company (and featuring a shout-out to my […]
For years, in my late teens and early twenties, I carried the following lines by Annie Dillard with me, invoking them in hopes of absorbing the ache of my most wrenching choices: “There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is […]
Or, My Path to Internet Sovereignty, in Ten Harrowing Steps: 1. At the suggestion of Sarah Mac, of Money Mindset for Creatives, I tracked my time, in fifteen-minute increments, for a dozen or so days—and found that the three activities I didn’t feel good about could be summed up in a simple acronym: EFT. No, […]
[Mardi Gras was one Zendik’s biggest money-makers. Each year, a passel of us descended on New Orleans and sold ourselves silly. Fanatics of other stripes also saw opportunity. In early 2000, after I’d been at the Farm for a few months and sold a handful of far tamer scenes, I begged a chance at the […]