Before Charles Darwin married his cousin and begot their ten children, three of which would die and break his heart, he documented the following internal debate ( Read more... )

Dear Patrick ( Read more... )

She's a noisy machine ( Read more... )

“But guilt is guilt. It doesn’t go away. It can’t be nullified. It can’t even be fully understood, I’m certain - its roots run too deep in private and long-standing karma. About the only thing that saves my neck when I get to feeling this way is that guilt is an imperfect form of knowledge. Just because it’s imperfect doesn’t mean it can’t be ( Read more... )

They are champion-sleepers, my heroes ( Read more... )

The program brochure called it “adventure learning.” It promised hands-on experience, wild animals, steep edges, bright colors, pointy things. There were ding`ing light bulbs over our heads, but we shrugged modestly, filled out the paperwork, held our breaths, and waited ( Read more... )

Poets have much too narrow a focus, I’ve decided. Modern industrial shame prohibits us from discussing at any real length the elements radiating from the skies or the ground we walk on or the plants and animals we eat. That would be shallow, tedious, predictable. To become interesting, we speak less of reality than of imagination, of make- ( Read more... )

Ecuadorian farm-hands use a machete for everything. Yesterday, we used machetes and only machetes to complete the following tasks: weeding, planting, creating a new seedbed, weeding, harvesting, weeding. Not cutting grass, not hacking up Rwandan children in the 1990, just very ordinary garden tasks that could quite easily be accomplished through ( Read more... )

Have arrived at farm. Like it there. Working hard, but not too hard. Many vegetables, many animals. Dogs and cats running around. Bats roosting above the breakfast table (cute, not creepy). Fed well. Learning. Taking organic ag class. Use machetes a lot ( Read more... )

I know that everyone and their mom has forty thousand other more urgent things to read, but this one really is a treat, I promise:

http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Trouble_with_Wilderness_Main.html