Absolutely no simple living happening here! This is a place for rumination, cultivation, curation, and creativity in pursuit of the complex, organic, authentic, dirty, imperfect, layered, rich, lush life!
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Being Human: Living Like a Hunter and Gatherer at Home
I’ve been reading a book called Being Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness by Charles Foster. And it has definitely had an impact on the way I interact with our landscape. In Being Human, the author and his son attempt to travel back in time by way of a thought experiment and lifestyle…
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Lush Living
If I were to sum up my life right now in one word it would be this: LUSH The garden is coming into peak season with cabbages sizing up, the first peppers appearing, herbs branching, and flowers blooming. The foliage is now so thick in some places that my garden “rooms” feel as enclosed as…
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Fairytale
I recently posted photos of the deeply discounted roses, plucked from the half-dead shelf at the hardware store, that I planted last year. When my sister saw the images, she remarked “It’s like a fairytale.” As much as I dislike the modern concept of fairytale, I know what she means. There’s something sublime about a…
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Befuzzlement
Matt’s got the most amazing vocabulary. It’s so impressive that even when he’s correcting my pronunciation or challenging my word selection, I’ve come to appreciate that it’s not because he’s an intellectual snob. It’s because he considers me a person with the capacity to benefit from his linguistic superiority. So… last night in the garden,…
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Charm City
Baltimore first cast its spell on me 12 years ago. Prompted by an incredibly intriguing profile posted on a dating app, I parallel parked Felicia the Fit outside the steps of a Bolton Hill townhouse, turned apartment building. Moments later, Matt emerged from behind a hundred year old door. Seeing him standing 6’2”, in dark…
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Compounding Influence
Yes… December was much too cold. January too wet. And February was way above normal temperature wise. None of this bodes well for some of my marginal perennials that are only adapted to certain climate conditions. Truthfully, though, I’m tired of focusing on the things that aren’t right that I can’t control. Lately, I’ve shifted…
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Minding Time
Last year, approximately 525,949 minutes flowed through each of our lives. Like particles of air, some were captured in the biofilter of our brains, networked into our neural memory cells, and stored deeper over several nights of sleep effectively becoming part of us. Other minutes drifted quickly into the ether of the unremembered. Similar to…
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Channeling Climate Anxiety
Saturday morning when I walked outside, just after sunrise, it was already warm. The remnants of Nicole, an exceptionally late season hurricane that washed away structures in Florida before it diffused over land, had dropped three inches of rain on our North Carolina homestead. All the plants, still holding their leaves, glistened with large water…
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Reinvention
Our landscape is littered with signs of metamorphosis. The chicken run is like a slaughter site with so many molted feathers scattered about. Half of our hens look like they were plucked alive. Soon, though, those heritage poultry will be beautifully re-feathered in time for winter. And for a few months, our flock of majestic…