Category: FreeForm

  • Permaculture and Me

    I am pleased to announce that I have just returned from the spectacular Vancouver Island to the also spectacular, if colder, Cape Breton Island, bearing a new Certificate in Permaculture Design: I can’t tell you how excited I am to show you this. Also, isn’t it pretty? A couple of weeks ago, I undertook the…

  • Multipotentiality: It’s a Thing

    Originally published elsewhere, but since nobody paid me for it, and I didn’t transfer copyright, I disavow the very possibility of being able to plagiarize my own work. Especially since I use Creative Commons licensing. So there. Even though it’s a fairly new word in my world, multipotentiality surrounds me. And although I’ve seen some…

  • The Cuteness of Cuttlefish

    I know, it’s been a million years. Life, you know? Anyway. My kids are going along, doing cute kid stuff. My car died, and I got a new one, and the roof is leaking and we’re going to have to renegotiate the mortgage, and I still haven’t managed to place any paid writing, or even…

  • Voila! Instant Art!

    I’m taking a Coursera course about art concepts, and this week the assignment was to create an environmental installation piece. Since I had it up, photographed, and down within 10 minutes, I felt that I should share it more broadly… give it a chance to breathe, as it were. So, without further ado, Garden Party!…

  • Parenting Towards Enlightenment

    We, a class of aspiring yoga teachers, are sitting on the floor of the meditation hall at the ashram in India when the conversation turns to the conflict between practice and parenting. “But how,” asks one of the men, “do you work with being here when your children are somewhere else? You have to worry…

  • Peaceful Practice

    This was originally posted on The Peaceful Professional, another blog of mine which has apparently suffered catastrophic failure due to neglect. That is to say, I can’t find it any more, having made some errors in setting it up that I haven’t been able to repair. It is dead (for now), but the writing lives…

  • I could be anything

    If you could be anything, what would it be? “Anything?” she said. “Sure. Anything.” hmm… famous, beautiful, rich, immortal, a whale, a dolphin, a famous movie star… “I’ve got it!” she said. “So soon?” “So soon, so obvious.” “Well then, oh clever one, what will it be?” “Complete.” *** “And,” he said, after a pause…

  • Serial Having it All

    Several years ago, I was in the midst of a frantic time. I was working, going to school, still nursing a baby, up all night, getting up and driving to work at 6:30, getting home at 7:00 (or later), living on fast food and coffee, and generally… well. Frantic. And out of shape. Very out…

  • Saruman is not our Leader

    I want to get one thing straight. We’re not secretly evil. (1) It’s not like Canadians are trying to create Orthanc in the Boreal Forest… it’s just kind of… happening. You know, you can basically have the Global Warming/Climate Change/Environmental Pollution conversation with any five-year-old caught in the middle of trashing his room… “Augh! What…

  • What Does It Mean?

    An unsubtle synopsis of the last two decades of my unpublished writing which you should read while you can, because I’ll probably think better of it in an hour or two. “[These words.] I do not think they mean what you think they mean.” The first clause of the code of ethics for the Association…

  • Losing My Head

    I don’t know about where you are, but around here we have a saying, “She’d lose her head if it weren’t attached.” It is (I fear) applied to people like me, those of us who are wont to put things down where we are standing and then wander around for half an hour saying, “Where’d…

  • When in Rishikesh…

    All unannounced, (at least in blog-land) I went to India for a month last fall to study yoga and Ghandian philosophy. I couldn’t admit it to my blog, because then I would have had to admit it to myself, and I was having to sneak around my fears to be able to get myself to…