Blowin' my Mind

Very hard to concentrate on this Monday, in large part on account of the wind, which is blowing lots of nature around, and into many eyes. And so, it zaps the energy a bit, makes one feel a little less sharp than one would have been. And, so, the solution is to take a blog-break.

That, and I'm getting pulled once again into a life-topic, so I want to spend all my time learning about it, tweaking the life to conform to it, etc. The latest read is Radical Simplicity, recently teaching me that if everyone lived according to the way I live we would need 3 planets. Now, this is with a partial-vegetarian, 1 10-yr old car per household, modest-consuming existence. The size of the footprint has a lot to do with where I live, but is a lot less than my average compatriot (who uses roughly 24 acres of bioproductive land vs. my estimated 14). I can't imagine going "off the grid"--don't have the huevos for it, plus I like my quasi-urban amenities. But, the challenge is there to decrease the footprint within the current context. I know it can be done, the work is in the how.

Another (related) serendipitous book-find, by virtue of working in a library: The Meat You Eat: How Corporate Farming Has Endangered America's Food Supply, with foreword by Wendell Berry, who recently spoke here. That this book would stick out to me among all the others on the book truck, that the foreword is by someone I recently saw speak, etc., just reinforces how the connections are in place and we just have to train ourselves to be more observant of them.