Hello, my dear friends and family! I’m so sorry to have been out of touch for so long. The whirlwind that life always is has been especially intense for me over the past couple of months. It’s been great! But I’m glad things have calmed down a bit and I feel more able to step back and do things like write to you all. This entry will mostly just be ( Read more... )

In every part of the forest of the Cascades I’ve been in so far, whether it’s old-growth, young forest, or clear cut, as soon as I’ve gotten high enough on a hill or mountain to see the landscape from a slightly removed perspective, the history of logging on the land has immediately become obvious. Wherever I’ve been, I’ve seen the patchwork of ( Read more... )

The summer keeps marching on. The Ecovillage and Permaculture program has completed six weeks-two more left. I’m continuing to have fun with it and learn all the time. I can’t believe how quickly the time has gone, and how soon it will be over.

A few things from the course have stuck out at me since I last wrote. One was a field trip to Cougar ( Read more... )

Really, I found one last week. A few other friendly reminders of what it means to live in the country:

• more kinds of insects and spiders than I’ve ever seen (in the rest of my life combined, I think!)
• mice-and philosophical discussions about how best to remove them from your living space (since I’m pretty sure I know of mice that, contrary to my ( Read more... )

I'm sorry to my readers for the long break! Life has been chaotic to varying degrees for the past month. Its busyness shows no signs of letting up, but it does at least mostly seem to be stabilizing.

Lost Valley's summer Ecovillage and Permaculture Certificate Program (EPCP) started two weeks ago. There are twenty-one students here for it--mostly ( Read more... )

Lost Valley’s community Beltane celebration. (For anyone who doesn’t know, Beltane is the Gaelic name for the festival of spring-becoming-summer.) For scheduling reasons, it didn’t work out to have our celebration around the time generally considered to be Beltane-around May 1-so ours was two weeks late. But we had a heat wave last weekend, while ( Read more... )

The past couple weeks have felt like my busiest at Lost Valley so far. Partly that’s because the summer is approaching, and along with it is coming the Ecovillage and Permaculture course that my internship supports. As the course gets closer, there’s more and more to do to prepare for it. This year there will be three main instructors-Rick Valley ( Read more... )

Last night there was an open mic at Lost Valley. It was good--it brought a lot of people from outside the community, a couple of whom performed some great stuff. There's a culture here--actually, it's all over the place, but I've seen more of it in the Eugene area than I've ever seen before--of living differently than mainstream society. The parts ( Read more... )

Salvete omnes! Thank you for your interest in hearing what I have to say. My intention is to use this as a means to let people know what’s going on with me and to share some of my thoughts about my experiences.

It’s for a number of reasons that I’m starting this blog now. One big reason is my frustration with my track record for keeping in touch ( Read more... )