Isn’t it stunning? This is the current position of all the cargo vessels in the world. Just cargo vessels – I’ve set the filter to remove the passenger ships, the tankers, the fishing vessels, all the other types of sea traffic. How do we prepare for when those ships stop, or, if we are smarter than I think we collectively are, when they start using fuel that is clean and…
I love the chair. It saves me the angst of murdering perfectly healthy seedlings, or worse, being tempted to plant them and use up all my precious garden space on more basil or zucchinis than any household can stand. The chair brings me into lovely conversations with passers by who garden, even just pots on highrise balconies. Because I am sharing what I am myself planting, it creates conversations about…
A key insight of permaculture thinking is that there is no such thing as “side effects”. Everything has multiple effects. Everything exists in a networked ecology of interdependencies, ripples, cascades and risk insurance redundancies. So verge gardening has to be looked at as a sector analysis that takes account of all the “wild energies” of “the public”, and some of them are quite wild.
There’s a review of ‘470’ on the Transition Australia website, and it is by the kind of reader that every writer dreams of. It has done something that the best of reviews do: it has seen things that I hadn’t seen, in my own book.
The more gardens there are in my neighbourhood, the less likely mine will get raided. So I’m all in for encouraging, supporting, and contributing to that. And a very easy way to do it is to share seeds. Locally adapted saved seed, fresh and in season, in small quantities, bred from heirloom gardeners’ varieties rather than commercial varieties – it’s a treasure as a gift to anyone starting a food…
I love having a craft activity in my life. Simple, repetitive, meditative hand work. Knitting or hand-sewing or embroidery, whittling or sanding or carving, painting or potting or mosaic. You hear so much of how healthy it is to do daily meditation, but I don’t have the self discipline for it. Life beckons from too many places.
My Halloween lantern for tonight. A particularly daggy one, but Happy Halloween everyone anyway everyone! I am remembering to be grateful for what I have inherited from the ancestors, generation through generation. Music, stories, art, science, inventions, roads, trainlines, medicine, tools. I am remembering to be grateful, and in gratitude, pay it forward.