Eliza Daley ~ Wordcraft & Musing on Home & Hope
I tossed out what many seem to have construed as a slur on Western Americans last week, mostly, I confess, for the alliterative qualities of the phrase. (Because I do like me some euphony.) I said Burqueños are “laconic and lazy” (and not much interested in your specialness). Far from being derogatory, this is high… Continue reading In Praise of Laziness
I need to explain something. Because there seems to be quite a bit of explication directed at my writing. Well, truly, aimed at me. Those who are explaining have normally not read what I’ve written, never mind all that I’ve read and researched on each essay topic. That is to say the explainers frequently do… Continue reading A Short Riposte
A very typical response to my writing can be summarized as: “But… cities?!?” How are we going to fit cities into this future world? My feeling is that we can’t. Mostly. I’ve never explicitly said that cities are not optimal, but I think it’s fairly obvious what my biases are. I will be honest, I… Continue reading But… Cities?
In which there are beavers... The first moon of the lunar year begins in the wee hours of 5 November. This is my Winter Sleep Moon. The Old Farmer’s Almanac, which roughly uses Backwoods traditional names for lunations, calls the moon that is full in November the Beaver Moon. The beaver lodge in a pond… Continue reading Winter Sleep Moon
It is All Hallows’ Eve, Hallowe’en, the first day of the ancient new year festival called Samhaine, which is usually translated as “end of summer”. This is one of the few clear remnants from at least one of the cultures we now name “Celtic”. The word, Samhaine, shows up in the Late Roman Era luna-solar… Continue reading All Hallows: An Entanglement
Because humans do seem to have a hive mind and because that is accentuated by our repeater medias, I saw several things that talked about heating this week. As in heating living and working spaces in the winter, not as in climate heating, though that was part of it. All were framed in a “we… Continue reading On “Renewables”
I’ve been an armchair archeologist/anthropologist for most of my life. I’ve always had a fascination with deep history. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to tease out the Story of Us not mediated through the words of the privileged few; and deep history, pre-history, is where you find the story before it was broken. Further, when… Continue reading Gatherers
4 October is the feast day of St Francis of Assisi. You might know him as the irreverent but apt moniker, St Francis of the Birdbath, because that is where many of us encounter him. Bare-headed with the monk's tonsure, dressed in rough robes and coarse rope belting, he stands with one palm out, feeding… Continue reading St Francis of the Birdbath
I feel like I’ve been working through first principles for a while. But I haven’t covered one big one — dualities. Our propensity to look at the extreme end points of a spectrum and not the entire spectrum. To classify everything as good or bad, when neither actually exists. I think about this quite a… Continue reading Duality and Reality
We often talk about justice in terms of the harvest. There is a certain poetic fitness in this. The work that goes into creating a harvest, the sowing and cultivating, is balanced by a commensurate reward. You get out something proportional to what you put in. When applied literally this reward is nourishment, food —… Continue reading False Harvest
By My Solitary Hearth 