Thinking Local

...ates who promise to, so to speak, drain the reservoir of its current swamp creatures. For those of you not in Silver Lake, the problems with our council, I think, are at least in part part of a general inability to work in groups, a byproduct of the triumph of individualism and consumerism. In the past most people belonged to some sort of community group such as a club, synagogue, church, lodge etc. In those groups we used to see each other social...

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Tolkien and Trees

...abashed partisan of trees. A couple of quotes from him regarding trees are making the rounds on the internet, but I’ve learned to distrust popular quotations. They are often misattributed or downright made up. So I searched his edited letters for references to trees. There are many–he always mentions trees when he describes places, has funny things to say about artists who can’t draw trees, and has many trees of significance in his books, which he...

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Grief is the pathway to action

...the room, which we walk around and talk past, and do our best to ignore by making our lives ever busier. And anyway, what are we supposed to do about it? Suburbia by David Shankbone. Tract housing in Colorado Springs Action I think there is something to do about it–about both the grief and the problems which lead to the grief. I’m talking about work and atonement. First, we in the developed world must own that our lifestyle has cost this planet de...

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Creating a Moon Garden

...t pollinators and other wildlife. Bornstein had a number of great tips for making a garden interesting at night: Consider color. White flowers, of course, will pop out under moonlight. But yellow flowers stand out even more. We’re lucky in Southern California to have a lot of native plants with silvery grey leaves (an evolutionary adaption of dry climate plants). Masses of silvery grey leaves stand out well at night. Include a contrasting backgrou...

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We heal together

...te science since returning from the conference. This has had the effect of making me both angry and sad and very grateful for what we have now. The world is infinitely precious to me, all of the wonders and creatures in it, the hummingbirds in the sage, the chickens in their coop, you all and your families, scattered all around the world, reaching out to contact us here. We’ve not spoken much of matters of the spirit on this blog. This is largely...

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