When you are flying* across the country, as I happened to do this week, it gives you a chance to observe the landscape in ways that we cannot otherwise see. When we are on the ground, we are able to …
Druidry and the Art of Sustainable, Meaningful Offerings
In druidry and in other earth-centered religions, its customary to make offerings to spirits, the ancestors, guides, outsiders, etc. We usually do this as part of ritual or solitary practice. Recently, the issue of what to use as offerings came …
Natural Building II: Rocket Stoves!
Earlier this week, I blogged about my visit to the Strawbale Studio. In this second Natural Building post, I’m going to talk about the rocket stove workshop itself. I’m quite excited about rocket stoves, because they use simple materials to …
Natural Building I: The Strawbale Studio
Yesterday, I attended a rocket stove building workshop at the Strawbale Studio and the sustainability-focused work of Deanne Bednar. In this post, I want to spend time highlighting the Strawbale Studio and Deanne Bandar’s work as an excellent example of …
Oak Knowledge: Value of Bardic, Ovate, and Druid Knowledge
In the ancient Celtic world, the word “druid” meant “oak knowledge” or more broadly “deep knowledge” (Cunliffe, 1997). This likely referred to the wide variety of activities that druids participated in and the knowledge they held–the knowledge of the law, …
Chickens and Sustainability
Chickens as part of a sustainable system. Raising chickens has become an activity of growing importance within permaculture/sustainability movements. Most backyard chicken owners raise their birds for eggs, meat, companionship, manure, happiness, and natural pest control. Chickens can form one …
Sustainability, Climate Change, and Inaction: A Stasis Theory / Rhetorical Analysis
One of the most frustrating issues in the sustainability and environmental movements today is the lack of serious discussion or action of any kind on the part of world governments and leaders. While we have stunning examples of people enacting …
Building Outdoor Sacred Spaces, Part III: Other Small Projects
Welcome to my 3rd blog post about building outdoor sacred spaces. In my first post, I discussed stacking stones or stone cairn building. In my second post, I discussed building larger spaces, like stone circles and spirals. In this post, …
OBOD East Coast Gathering 2012 Review
“Breathe deeply and enter through your heart’s door Where Stag and Salmon leap; where Hawk soars o’er the tor Where Starry Bear journeys from dusk till dawn. Spiral the heavens! Time Untime lingers on.” –Barb Pott (Crescent Birch Grove, …
Raised Garden Beds from Salvaged/Found Materials
A lot of gardeners today use the raised bed method to grow plants. I have been doing pseudo-raised beds in the garden for two years now. The raised beds are higher than the ground (since my local dirt is deficient …
Know Your History to Save Your Future
I attended a talk, titled “Local Food Starts at Home” and sponsored by two knowledgeable friends of mine, that focused on increasing awareness of local foods and building a sustainable foodshed in the future for our area. At the beginning …
Making Berry Inks (Huckleberry, Raspberry, Blackberry, Pokeberry, etc.)
Ink making is a wonderful way to use up some of the fabulous berries that you can forage for outdoors or grow in your garden. With berry ink, you can do wonderful water washes, use a dip pen and write …
Seed Saving 101: Spinach & Lettuce Seed Saving
Before Monstanto, before Walmart, and before any modern hybrid seeds available in convenient packets, humans saved seeds from season to season. This brought us closer to our land, to the cycle of life, death, and rebirth, and to our own …
Earth for Sale: Exploitation, Shared Resources, and the Future
Are there limits on what can be sold in our world? A life? A habitat? A community? A forest? An ecosystem? A home? The rivers? The oceans? A sacred site? Clean air? Unfortunately, in our culture everything is for sale–including …
Six Principles for Local Eating
Our eating practices can be incredibly environmentally and personally destructive. In the typical food system in America, we ship food from all corners of the earth burning fossil fuels, we exploit workers and growers, we depend upon multinational corporate food …
Living With Rather than Against Nature
A central concept in Druidry is peace. At the beginning of each druidic ritual, we declare peace in the quarters. We a say a prayer for peace (which you can see in my painting I posted earlier this year). But …
Long-Term Orientations: Oil, Fracking, and the Environment of the Future
“In our way of life, in our government, with every decision we make, we always keep in mind the Seventh Generation to come. It’s our job to see that the people coming ahead, the generations still unborn, have a world …
Growing Kale and Kale Chip Recipie
Eating a locally-based, mostly plant diet is a key way of reducing your impact on our earth mother. Finding foods that are easy to grow, highly nutritious, easy to preserve, and harvestable for most of the year make eating sustainably …
Garden Updates – July 2012
Hello everyone! Its been a while since I posted actual updates from the garden. So here are some new photos! We have had very little rain in the last two months, so I’ve had to water a bit. The heat …
Papermaking, Part II: Papermaking from Plant Materials (Cattail Fibers)
In my last post, I detailed the steps for making handmade paper from recycled materials. In that post, I also detailed the basic steps of making paper, from blending to couching to pulling and pressing sheets. Recycled fibers are a …
Hand Papermaking, Part 1: Recycled Papermaking
This is a post on papermaking using recycled fibers. I also have two posts on natural papermaking with cattail heads (which works well) and cattail leaf (which needs some improvement). The commercial process of producing paper is an incredibly environmentally …