Spiritual journeys in tending the living earth, permaculture, and nature-inspired arts
One of the great joys and challenges of our present time is finding a way into a deeper connection with our ancestors, the living earth and her processes, and our own human gifts. A lot of this practice is slowing …
Where we live–the spaces we inhabit, and how they are designed, make an enormous difference in how we are able to address climate change and sustainability. Modern houses are commonly disconnected both from the land where they are placed but …
As many of us seek to transition from our current destructive culture and create a powerful vision for the future, we need good models of what this kind of transition may look like. As we are moving forward, this often …
In last week’s post, we began exploring the build of an earth oven. An Earth Oven is a simple structure, made of clay, sand, straw, stone, and fire brick, that you can use to cook foods in a traditional way. …
An earth oven is an oven made of cob (a mixture of clay, sand, and straw) with insulating features (firebricks, bottles). It is an extremely efficient and sustainable method of doing any baking you might need to do. One firing …
Today, we are taking a walk through the sacred gardens at the Druid’s Garden Homestead. There are so many lessons to learn with a simple walk in a beautiful garden. Today’s Lughnasadh garden walk reminds us of the power of …
A lifetime ago, myself and a dear friend dug some clay out of a hillside. We each took half of it. My half of the clay was used to form an earthen statue, a guardian statue, for that same friend …
In a meadow under the summer sun, a group of dancers laugh and fling mud. Beneath their feet, clay, sand, and water become mixed together, creating a sticky earthen blend that sticks to their feet, their legs, and, after some …
Connecting with the earth can mean a lot of things–and today, I want to talk through how to create a simple building material that can be used for a wide variety of purposes: cob. Cob is an ancient building material …
As I described in last week’s post, at least here in the US, we have serious challenges befalling us with plastic recycling along with a host of waste plastics that can never be recycled. A recycling infrastructure built almost exclusively …
A tremendous amount of really difficult occurrences are happening in the world right now. It seems like the more time that passes, the more we balance on the edge. The edge of what exactly, nobody can say. But the edge …
In my quest for sustainable items for ritual and mundane purposes, I want to share something that I learned at the Strawbale Studio‘s recent workshop on natural, earth-friendly gifts: cob / earthen candle holders, paperweights, and other useful cob objects. …