Living on earth; living in the land; living in community.  Living large.  (And don’t tell me you aren’t hearing “La Vida Loca” in your head right now.  It’s okay.  You’re only human.)

I used to spend summers at summer camps in the back woods of Maine. I spent all the other seasons growing up in a village outside of Vienna, on a half-acre lot that was basically a diversified orchard on a steep hill. I have had, and do have, a whole theology of water. And of course I garden like it’s my j.o.b.  So life, for me, is pretty well rooted in the world outside.  Gene Logsdon has a beautiful book on agrarianism as “The Mother of All Arts,” which I’d like to review properly here…agrarian thinking and writing are pretty key to my worldview.  As is the Craftsman movement…argh, I haven’t explained all that yet.  But I will.  Somewhere.  My point is this: we don’t live outside the world, or the land, or our communities.  Even if we think we do, or imagine that we should, we are always embedded.  Mother Nature is doing a pretty good job of proving this point lately.  Where disaster leaves off with us, community picks up, usually according to our own depth of embeddedness.  When we’re tucked in tight, we’re harder to uproot.  But then, if we float like seagulls, we don’t get drowned quite so often.  Interesting quandary.

But seriously.  This page is where a number of impulses come together: to be useful, to be in relationship, to honor what the world gives us and keep trying to make more of it.