Regenerative Farming and Gardening

Building Ecosystems as a Side Effect of Growing Food

About a 5 minute read

Strongly interrelated and networked elements in a vegetable garden, an orchard, a community, or any other living system, are healthier and happier than isolated fragments of life subsisting alone and unmoored.

Rungi - Rainforest Floor Vegetable

About a 3 minute read

A vegetable from the tropical highlands of Papua New Guinea, rungi is an attractive, edible, nutritious year-round ground cover for the tropics and semi-tropics that tolerates a wide range of growing conditions.

Sweet Violet - Edible, Medicinal, Beautiful

3-4 minute reading time | Published Nov 2020, updated Nov 2023

Allow me to introduce you to sweet violet or wild violet (Viola odorata), a beautiful little shade-tolerant, ground-covering plant with a long list of nutritive and medicinal uses. 

When "Do Something" Fails, There Is Another Way

About a 3 minute read

The logical mind wants to muscle its way to the results we want; when muscle is inadequate to the task, we think we’ve failed and we’re out of options.

The heart, on the other hand, is not afraid to invoke the results we want by the quality of our attention and the power of our desire to give what we don’t physically have to give.  

Expanding on the Grandmother Effect

The “Grandmother Hypothesis,” or Grandmother Effect, is the idea that the presence of grandmothers helping in the care of their grand-offspring has been an important factor in human survival and evolution. 

I think that the powers of older women extend far beyond babysitting (valuable as that is), and I think we need their contributions more now than ever before. Here's why.

Through the Lenses of Separation and Interbeing

About a 2 minute read

Logical, rational thinking understandably sees things as separate. 'I am me; that is something "other" than me.'

The “other” can be another person, another group separate from the group to which I belong, or a non-human entity like a river or a forest.

There is another way to see things. Through a lens of interbeing, I am still me, but now I recognize that I’m closely related to everything that the mindset of separation calls “other.”

The Dominant Healthcare Approach vs Marginalized Alternatives

This is less than a 2 minute read

In our culture, control and separation are given more importance than compassion and relationship.

To illustrate what I mean, here's a comparison between the dominant approach to healthcare and the marginalized, "alternative" approaches.

Supermarket Food is Like a Tiger in a Zoo

This post is about a 2 minute read

Real food is more expensive than supermarket food if you measure only in dollars. But here’s the thing: if you can measure its value in dollars, it’s not really real food.

The value of food was never meant to be measured. To measure something, you have to separate it out from the other things it’s connected to. As soon as you do that, it becomes a hollow, disconnected copy of what it was before it was isolated.

Why Carbon Accounting Isn’t Working and What We Need to Do Instead

First published  7th Oct, 2020. Updated 10th Oct, 2024 | 2 minute read

The problem with focusing on carbon accounting is that it leads people on both sides of the debate into thinking that so long as we emit less carbon/sequester more carbon, business can otherwise continue as usual and everything will be ok.

A few years ago I read Climate: a New Story* by Charles Eisenstein. This post shares some of what I took away from it and some of the thoughts I had in response to it. It's a fairly short read, about 2 or 3 minutes.