a beginning...

I am so excited by gardening, composting, permaculture and working towards living in ecological ways these days. I am so into exploring these things, and also am facinated by the influence these things have on community-building. For some reason i want to create a blog to write and play with some of the stuff i'm learning about. So, here's this blog.

It's inspired and influenced by all kinds of things. The name comes from something a character in Starhawk's book The Fifth Sacred Thing says about the amazing community that the citizens have made of San Francisco. That it may look like they have unlimited resources - water flows through the city, food and flowers are growing everywhere, it's green and lush all over - but they have merely learned how to recycle everything as much as they possibly can, and live within their own means.

"It looks so lush. She took a long, deep breath, then another. You'd think we had plenty of everything, plenty of land, plenty of water. Whereas we've simply learned how not to waste, how to use and reuse every drop, how to feed chickens on weeds and ducks on snails and let worms eat the garbage. We've become such artists of unwaste we can almost compensate for the damage. Almost." - Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing.

I send out thank yous for the inspiration to Starhawk, the gardens, Heather C. Flores of Food Not Lawns, the mycorrhyzzal fungi that co-exist with forests, our old 57 acres in the Marlborough Swamp where i began to learn about nature and myself, mint, Linda Chapman who first taught me the word permaculture, the housies, the housies of the past, compost, the climbing trees, community gardens everywhere, seed savers, The Stop Food Community Centre, permaculturers, paradise gardeners, food activists and foodies everywhere, and earth itself.