Eliza Daley ~ Wordcraft & Musing on Home & Hope
One of the main thrusts of my thinking and writing is about home. The concept, the application, the economics and management. Recently, I’ve had reason to reconsider my relationship to home, to my home and to my idea of home. I wrote about this, I thought exhaustively, a few weeks ago; but it turns out… Continue reading Homeless
I’ve thought of something I can do with Wednesdays! I participate in various prompts and puzzles on Twitter. I find it helps to keep an old mind limber, being forced to think and create using some idea that is not native to my brain. It forces new perspective. It’s also great fun. And it is… Continue reading The Wednesday Word
In the last few years I’ve seen a wide variety of people arrive at the conclusion that what we need as a society to avert self-destruction — self and everything else, that is — is a new religion. I’ve encountered sociologists (who might be predisposed), economists (who probably are not), celebrity chefs and actors, personal… Continue reading Gimme That Ol’ Time Religion
I have to stop comments on this blog. I don't know what it is about my writing, or maybe every blog experiences this and other writers are just better at coping with it, but I get such a lot of really nasty stuff. Not related to anything I've written. It seems that me simply being… Continue reading A Change to Wednesdays
Recently, I read an essay by a high school teacher, Belle Chesler, describing her plague year. Near the end she writes this: The skills and the knowledge we promote as most valuable are tied to workforce demands — not to what should count as actual life learning or growth. When you narrow achievement to what’s… Continue reading On Education
June! The month of weddings and graduations, strawberries and roses. Lavender and thyme come into bloom and lemonade stands blossom around the neighborhood. But mostly it is a month of slack. This is a between time. Planting time is winding down but harvest is not yet winding up. School is out but summer programs haven’t… Continue reading Summer Reading
I planted apple trees today. They arrived a couple weeks before we were to move. I had ordered them last summer and forgotten about them entirely. However, I had no intention of putting them in the ground that would soon be yet another past garden. Not least because I didn’t have time to do that.… Continue reading How To Start Over
I wrote this in 2017. It is still depressingly relevant. And ever more urgent. Science is not a debate. It is not a conversation between opposing points of view. It is not a balanced discussion of belief systems. Science is the refinement of factual knowledge through the application of reproducible observation and experimentation. Opinion and… Continue reading On the Myth of Debatable Science
As you are reading this, I’m moving into the first home I’ve bought. Consequentially, I’m thinking quite a bit about what home means. What it means to me, what it means in the abstract, what it means for our collective culture. Picket fence and all! Many of the common ideas about home in Euro-western culture… Continue reading Becoming Home
The problem? How do you mark this day? Most years, I don’t. I’m not Hispanic. My best friend growing up was Mayan and there were complicated feelings about Mexico related to that. I never thought there was much to celebrate. We learned in grade school that it’s a commemoration of a 19th century Mexican victory… Continue reading Cinco de Mayo
By My Solitary Hearth 