through a series of links, i found this video online & cannot stop watching it. mesmerizing. gorgeous. makes me want to collaborate on a music video.

or, why it’s been so quiet on this here blog! i’ve been posting several times a day on instagram, an i-phone photo app, which is also available online as webstagram.

easier than a blog, Facebook, or flickr – i can share my daily work, walks and explorations with you right away on instagram & webstagram!

my website programmer will be working on incorporating my webstagram feed here on the blog soon, but in the meantime check out my feed.

Free Libraries Hit Minneapolis Lawns: MyFoxTWINCITIES.com

found via tree hugger!

“From tiny houses, tool libraries to downloadable design, integrating the concepts of open source sharing, collaborative consumption and “building tiny” into our lives is something that we know is better for the planet. From Wisconsin comes the Little Free Library, an amazing little social enterprise that has all of these elements, aiming to build a network of tiny, community libraries the world over — no library card needed.”

those of you who follow this blog know how much i adore watching/listening to ted talks in the studio!

well! when the local independent version of TED, TEDx Concordia U Portland, asked if i’d be interested in donating items for their gift bags in exchange for a pass to the event you know what my answer was!

see you there?

so, you know how hindus have their spring holi festival, which, as wiki says “culminates with a bonfire, throwing colored powder at each other, and going absolutely crazy”?

well, i love the colored powder idea but i teach in march so it’s hard to get to india, nepal or pakistan, or anywhere really, to properly participate.

enter the color run, a colored powder running tour hitting u.s. cities this year. you wear a white shirt and run three miles hitting different colored powder stations along the way. could be hokey, could also be tons of fun. i’d love to see/hear from anyone that’s participated in one of the other cities before it hits portland in august! thanks plenty of color for the head’s up!

so inspiring! a friend just concluded a juicefast & her resulting physical & mental clarity is amazing. she, and then i, were inspired by the movie fat, sick and almost dead.

at the beginning of this week, i borrowed her juicer and i’ve been on a “half-assed juice fast” – fresh juices supplemented with soup, and still drinking coffee & tea. i’d wanted to ease into the fast and avoid the pounding headache everyone complains about the first few days. well, i still got the headache. and a slight cold. i’m sure the cold is more from my busy schedule than the fast.

today i’ll switch to the “strict juice fast”, even with my sniffles. can’t wait to look and feel great in 10 days! my favorite juice so far is sweet potato & apple [shown above].

found via another video on the future of art from brain pickings.

i’m still recovering from my weekend in seattle and trying to restore my home and studio to some semblance of order before crafty wonderland this weekend! see you there?

i mean, how can you not love the idea of “open source collaboration?” along with others through social media, britta riley developed and perfected the window farms garden system. you can buy the group’s beautifully-made ready-made kit, or download free plans to build your own from soda bottles.

instead of being online with you, i’ve been enjoying the holiday with friends, at home and in the yard. although i took the above photo a while ago, it captures my mood of the past few days perfectly. cloudy day with a chance of rain. but so much color, beauty and abundance in all the possibilities of those clouds and that day.
thanksgiving was cloudy, rainy, cold. perfect for staying indoors and eating too much. perfect for going to see the new muppets movie. i want to travel by map exclusively from now on, and watch that chicken sketch once a day for the next week. i’ve also been prepping. holiday event season begins tuesday, the webstore needs holiday updating, the holiday mass email needs sending, and the yard needed to be prepped for winter. the weather has been obligingly crisp, cool and non-rainy for the yard work, so i began there.

i smothered the last patch of non-converted front lawn weed patch with several layers of wet cardboard boxes, then added piles of leaves on top to decay & make dirt over the winter. the leaves were courtesy of my own, my neighbors’ and my other neighbors’ sidewalks & street gutters. happy holidays neighbors, i swept your walks & streets for you [me]! the next step for lasagna gardening/lawn smothering is usually adding a layer of dirt or compost on top of that, but after i got done extensively trimming the front hedges i piled those branches on top of the leaves to keep them in place instead. in the following weeks as those branches make their way into the yard recycling bin, i’ll add the dirt layer. or it might just all sit there til spring. it’s not an eyesore. it’s behind a fence and right now while all the trimmings are green it looks like a bush.

rearranging all the dead leaves and matter is the prime winter-prep job in my yard. removing it from some planting areas to encourage the growth of the green left behind, adding it to other areas to smother and discourage the unwanted green weeds that would later smother my spring garden seedlings.

another prime job to do after a good hard rain is observing and assessing the new green growth. is this sprout familiar? it’s cute and green now, but what will it grow into come spring? is this a good spot for it? should i remove it or transplant it? living with this patch of land for a few years now i’ve learned about the plants that live here. it’s been interesting to see the progression of plants that come in and out of the yard each year and to cultivate them to achieve something resembling an attractive and food productive yard. it’s never finished. this is both maddening and exhilarating at the same time.

images from my autumn days here in portland interspersed with excerpts from the kickoff talk of the latest bioneers conference. ideas that are difficult and overwhelming to think about, yet constantly inspiring and ever more prescient every day. just like life.

the nature of nature is change, but sometimes it hurdles into fast forward tripping radical shifts. scientists call it “nature’s regime shift.” for the first time people are causing it on a planetary scale and it can be irreversible, at least on a human timeframe. when people talk about saving the earth, we would better frame it as saving ourselves.
every major empire over the past several hundred years has undergone a predictable cycle of collapse. the hallmarks are always the same: the financialization of the economy, moving from manufacturing to speculation, very high levels of debt, extreme economic inequality, and costly military over reaching.
every empire has had an idiosyncratic ability to exploit a particular energy source that propelled it’s rise to economic power. no empire has been able to manage the transition to the next energy source. the climate imperative today is to transition off of fossil fuels worldwide and it requires the most complex collaboration and urgent passage in the history of human civilization. nothing like it has ever been done.

as paul gilding writes in the great disruption, the science says we physically entered a period of great change, a synchronized yet related crash of the economy and the ecosystem. the great disruption will ultimately take society into a higher evolutionary state. we have the opportunity to build a society that represents our highest capacities, that works with rather than against nature. this crisis presents what may be a once-in-a-civilization opportunity. the severity of the crisis will drive a global response thats mammoth in scale and speed including the biggest economic and industrial transformation in history. the sooner we shift, the more options and the less pain we’ll have.

from chaos theory to the gaia hypothesis, a new cosmology is unfolding. in this paradigm the earth does not revolve around us… to move from breakdown to breakthrough we’re entering into the age of nature. this revolution from the heart of nature leads with a basic shift in our relationship with nature from resource and object to mentor, model and partner.

as janine benyus points out, “nature’s done everything we want to do without mining the past, polluting the planet, or mortgaging the future. the principles appear simple: nature runs on current sunlight, nature banks on diversity, nature rewards cooperation, nature builds from the bottom up, nature recycles everything, life creates conditions conducive to life.

nature also has a profound capacity for healing. the age of nature calls for a new social contract of interdependence. taking care of nature means taking care of people, taking care of people means taking care of nature.

when huge shocks transform the landscape, structures and institutions crumble releasing tremendous amounts of bound-up energy and resources for renewal and reorganization. novelty emerges. it’s a period of creativity, freedom and transformation. these times belong to those who learn, innovate and adapt. the name of the game is resilience… the heart of resilience is diversity. resilience teaches us. decentralized systems create backups and redundancy.