Eliza Daley ~ Wordcraft & Musing on Home & Hope
We need more geology in school. Or perhaps ecology. Probably both. If we are to survive, we need to understand who and what we are, and for that we need to understand this world that made us. We are earthly beings. We are small parts of a small planet on an average star in the… Continue reading Home Soil
i am out of my element this abundance of soppy green perplexes the rhythms are all wrong me with my down beat shovel when the local conductor still has the baton raised my biological clock reads time for peas and is confounded by snow yet the grass is leaping in the perennial bed where it… Continue reading green garden for a desert rat
Vermont has food waste laws. We can’t put anything edible or compostable into the trash. On the face of it, this is a good law. It’s a bit murkier in practice. First, like most of New England, maybe most of the country by now, there is no municipal waste collection in my city. We pay… Continue reading On Cold Composting
Every religion needs its mythos. I wrote this one a while ago and posted it last year. It seems a good day to share it again. Eve Eve woke up with the birds each morning. The piping and burbling of thousands of little brown birds in the reeds, so numerous in kind they’d not even… Continue reading An EarthCraft Origin Story
It's dark. I know this happens every year. Intellectually, I am good with the decreasing daylight. I welcome the idea of more time to stew in the starlight, less time of constant chop chop chop in the sun. I welcome the idea... but I'm a bit more conflicted on the practical application. Especially when rain… Continue reading Wednesday Word: 6 October 2021
Time is telescoping again. I’m fairly certain I was just writing about Lughnasadh a few days ago, and here it is the autumnal equinox. The Full Harvest Moon will have risen and set by the time you read this. The blueberry bushes are picked bare; peaches are a sweet memory; tomatoes are just an annoyance… Continue reading Celebrating Harvest Home
All around the globe, these are days of balance. For much of the planet’s midsection, this is not a big change, but it is a shift, usually between rainy and dry seasons. For the South, summer is approaching and it is finally getting warm again, while up North, we’re heading into winter. But South or… Continue reading Balanced Time
There is an oldish adage among writers that claims that you almost always have to write the book that you want to read. I don’t know how true that is of fiction. I have a very difficult time coming up with narratives that I like and that have not yet been written, and I’ve read… Continue reading How Not to Garden
Lately, I've been musing on the debate between those who claim that human nature is inherently selfish and those who say that we are oriented to cooperation and care. I am beginning to think that this is artificial, that the drive to name our nature is, in fact, an urge to excuse our actions. It… Continue reading The Wednesday Word: 18 August 2021
It’s planting season! And here you thought it was harvest, right? You’d be forgiven for thinking that. There is very little talk about autumn planting. For that matter, there’s also very little talk of spring harvests. But both are integral to having a food supply all year long. If you don’t have a harvest of… Continue reading Autumn Planting
By My Solitary Hearth 